


Haven

by Roadie



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alex Danvers & Kara Danvers Sibling Feels, Alex Danvers & Lena Luthor Friendship, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Pandemic, F/F, Kara Danvers & Maggie Sawyer Friendship, Secondary ship Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2019-10-21 08:49:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17639615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadie/pseuds/Roadie
Summary: Alex’s tally did not count every day since Maggie and Kara’s departure. They left often, after all: it was their role to bring materials here, to the Deo Haven, from the mainland, and to deliver supplies produced here on the Haven to the crumbling mainland cities that needed them.Alex only began the tally when it became clear that their absence was extending beyond the usual. Normally, they’d be gone five days, seven. Fourteen, twenty, if something went wrong. But boats came and went, carrying runners and builders and laborers and tacticians of all kinds, and none of them brought Maggie back to her. People would leave, and return, and leave, and return again, mission after mission, and none of them came with Kara.Sanvers is the primary ship here. Supercorp is secondary but significant.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is set in a world heavily inspired by the Pandemic Legacy seasons 1 and 2 board games (YES I AM A NERD). You don’t need to be familiar with the games to understand the fic. There also isn’t much in terms of spoilers, if you’re thinking of playing either game yourself. There are some very mild spoilers for PL season 1, but nothing severe enough to impact gameplay. It takes place in the world of the PL season 2 prologue so there are no spoilers for S2 beyond what you’d read in the rulebook (and I have embellished the world tremendously). I have actually only played Season 2 through January, so if you’ve played that season, please keep spoilers out of the comments!
> 
>  **Trigger warnings** : None, really. Some medical stuff.
> 
>  **Other warnings** : There is a central plot point that will probably peeve some readers. If you are the kind of person inclined to leave hate mail for writers who don’t tell stories the way you want them to (or if you just don't want to be surprised), scroll down to the bottom of this page to be spoiled so you can make an informed decision about reading. 
> 
> This is not fully written but it’s currently sitting at 17k words in my google docs and probably 75% done. Will be publishing as I have time to write/edit, and as my amazing beta has time to review. 
> 
> As always, huge shout-out to Kelinswriter for her absolutely amazing editorial eye.

Every morning, Alex scratched a line into the bulkhead at the foot of her bed.

When she first began counting, she did it in the evenings, tallying the end of each day that passed without bringing Maggie and Kara home to her. But she soon realized that counting at night sent her loneliness to bed with her. The nights grew colder and she struggled to sleep under her too-thin blanket. Maggie was always so warm, and she shared her warmth with Alex. When they were together, the blanket was enough.

So instead, she began to tally the mornings: the end of each night in a cold bed, the beginning of a new day that might be the one that brought a boat with Maggie and Kara on board.

They would have to be together. Surely they would. They had sworn to her, both of them, that they would keep each other safe.

The tally did not count every day since Maggie and Kara’s departure. They left often, after all: it was their role to bring materials here, to the Deo Haven, from the mainland, and to deliver supplies produced here on the Haven to the crumbling mainland cities that needed them.

Alex only began the tally when it became clear that their absence was extending beyond the usual. Normally, they’d be gone five days, seven. Fourteen, twenty, if something went wrong. But boats came and went, carrying runners and builders and laborers and tacticians of all kinds, and none of them brought Maggie back to her. People would leave, and return, and leave, and return again, mission after mission, and none of them came with Kara.

Two weeks after Kara and Maggie had left, Deo Haven got word that Halifax had suffered a series of major plague outbreaks and was in turmoil. Panic and desperation triggered rioting and violence that led the disease to spread even further. Military and paramilitary squads had given up on trying to quell the city, choosing instead to surround it with barricades: nobody in, nobody out. It was forsaken.

All major routes to and from Deo Haven ran through Halifax.

The runners leaving the Haven after the fall of Halifax knew of the new routes they’d have to take to return home, but the ones who’d left when Halifax was still standing —they’d have to figure it out on their own.

Assuming they hadn’t been _in_ Halifax when it fell. If they were, then they were forsaken, too.

Alex didn't know whether Maggie and Kara might be barricaded inside Halifax. She feared they might be. She prayed they weren't.

And so, the tally.

Alex would give herself three hundred tally days of hope. She estimated it might have taken her sixty or sixty-five to start counting, so three hundred tally days would make it a year that they’d been gone.

At three hundred tally days, she would force herself to stop hoping. To stop squinting at every approaching vessel, looking for Kara’s blonde hair or Maggie’s olive skin.

At three hundred days, she would grieve.

She hashed her tallies the standard way: four vertical lines followed by a fifth slashed across, bundling her fives. She stacked the fives ten across, so that each row counted fifty. That meant she got six rows before she had to stop counting.

This morning, she crossed the end of her fourth.

 

—

 

Lena, Alex knew, did not count the days.

Alex knew this because she asked her, one evening, as they sipped from a flask of hooch, sitting together on the floor of Alex’s room. Lena spotted Alex’s tally and touched it, feeling the grooves of the harsh-marks carved into the battered steel wall.

“I don’t care how long she’s been gone,” Lena said quietly. “I don’t care because I’ll always keep looking for her on every ship. I’ll always hope for her to come back to me. And if she can’t come back to me in this life, then I’ll find her again in the next.”

People talked that way on the Haven: about afterworlds, about later lives. People prayed in the mornings and evenings. But nobody believed in any gods anymore, and when you stopped believing in gods, belief in the afterlife pretty much crumbled. No struts left to hold it up. The prayer, the sayings—they were just habit, really. Ritual.

Even the more grounded afterlife ideas—like, the ones that didn’t rely on alternate dimensions or cloud palaces or whatever—were hard to stomach. Alex desperately hoped she would not be reincarnated: what better life could she possibly aspire to on a planet overrun by a deadly and incurable plague?

But people spoke of gods and afterlives they didn’t believe in because it gave them comfort in this time of terror and helplessness, even as they pinned their hopes on scientists like Lena and Alex to find their actual salvation: a vaccine, or even better, a cure.

Lena, Alex knew, did not believe in gods or afterlives. But love had not treated Lena kindly in her life. She’d loved a few men in mundane ways, until they’d stopped loving each other in mundane ways. She had loved her brother, but her brother had engineered the virus that was now toppling humanity. She had loved her mother, but her mother had been the one to set it loose on the world, not understanding the scope of the damage it would do. Both of them had died in the plague they had created.

And then Lena, here on Deo Haven, had met Kara. Their friendship had quietly grown and blossomed until the intimacy of it had demanded more of them. It insisted on stronger words, and stronger still, until words were not enough and it found its way out through their bodies, together.

Alex had never seen Kara so deeply in love.

So Lena talked about afterlives and later worlds, because it let her imagine a future where she would see Kara again. It gave her that promise and that helped her keep going as, with every passing day, the likelihood that she’d see her again in this life became smaller and smaller and smaller.

Alex had met Maggie before that. They met during the last pandemic—the one that everyone, the entire world, had thought would be the _last_ pandemic. They were both conscripted into the military. Alex had been working at a research station, trying to develop a cure for the COdA virus that was sweeping the planet. Maggie had been working at a nearby roadblock, managing traffic flow in and out of the containment zone. Their relationship had been the opposite of Lena’s and Kara’s: the first night they met, they had fucked against the back of the mess hall building, barely hidden by a disused humvee and a cluster of trees. It became a regular thing: meals together, followed by quickies in dark corners.

Then Alex got promoted, and with her promotion came her own room, and with her own room came enough privacy for slower, more patient sex, and the kind of casual intimacies that felt so hard to imagine when the world felt on the brink of death. They tangled together on Alex’s impossibly narrow army cot, slick and warm and sated, and talked about their lives before COdA. About how Maggie had been a police detective, and Alex had worked for a government lab—a covert anti-terrorist unit researching antidotes to potential bioweapons.

The first time Maggie slept over, it was an accident: they were talking, and they talked until they both dozed off, Maggie’s head on Alex’s chest. In the morning, Maggie was mortified, searching their discarded clothes, checking tags on scattered underwear and BDUs to figure out which ones were hers.

Later, when Alex would finally realize she was in love, she’d pinpoint that morning as the moment it happened: watching Maggie’s bare ass scampering around the tiny room, pulling a bra from the back of the desk chair and socks from the floor, looking for all the world like a kid afraid of being scolded for staying out past curfew—

And yet, of course, looking not like a kid at all, for the ways Alex wanted to touch her.

“Maggie,” Alex had said, propping herself up on her elbow, still under the covers. “Maggie, you’re not late. Your shift doesn’t start for an hour.”

“No, I know,” Maggie had said, her voice strained. “But I just, I didn’t mean to...“

“Mean to what?”

She had turned sad, scared eyes to Alex. “You know. Overstay.”

And Alex smiled, and held an arm out toward Maggie. “You didn’t overstay.”

Maggie looked like a puppy afraid to be hit, but she leaned a little toward Alex, who had tucked the blankets tighter around her chest.. “I stayed the night. That’s… not what we do.”

“It’s not what we’ve _done_ ,” Alex corrected. And then the weight of what she was saying caught up to her, and she felt nerves twist in her gut. She swallowed hard and tamped it down. With a little stretch, she could just barely touch the cap of Maggie’s knee with her fingertips. “It’s not what we’ve done, but maybe I liked it.”

She heard Maggie inhale. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Maggie stepped a little closer, and Alex’s hand slipped around to touch the back of her knee, where she knew Maggie was sensitive.

“Maybe I’d like you to stay more often,” Alex breathed, looking up now at Maggie looking down at her. “If, you know. You want to.”

“I want to,” Maggie whispered. “I’ve—I’ve wanted to for awhile.”

“Me too,” Alex said.

Above her, Maggie smiled.

Two months later, Maggie’s checkpoint was attacked. Some of its staff were being carted to the base in bodybags and others infected with COdA were being quarantined, and that was when Alex knew.

She found Maggie that night, exhausted and managing a skeleton crew until reinforcements could be flown in, but alive, _alive,_ and mostly unharmed. And Alex hadn’t cared that Maggie was on duty, hadn’t cared that her subordinates or her superiors could see when she grabbed her and kissed her and made her swear that they would spend every possible night together for the rest of their lives.

And Maggie, on duty and in full view of her subordinates and her superiors, had kissed Alex back and promised _yes, yes, yes._

Alex was on the team that found the cure for COdA. Maggie was on the team that helped to administer it. And when everything began to calm down, when they were both discharged, Maggie was happy to follow Alex to her home in National City. Maggie had met Kara a few times before, as Kara sometimes travelled to the base on assignment from CatCo Worldwide Media. But in National City they got to know each other better, and Kara welcomed Maggie into her life, and their family, with open arms and an open heart.

They had three good years, all of them, before the new plague broke out.

It was a modified version of COdA. That much, Alex could tell almost right away. But the old vaccine didn’t work, and none of the best minds — not hers, not anyone’s —  could figure out how to modify the treatments to make them stick.

The three of them travelled together to Atlanta so that Alex could work with the CDC. And then, when the virus spread, a paramilitary team came to Alex and Maggie’s room and told them she was being taken somewhere safe from the disease where she could continue her research.

Alex refused to go anywhere without Maggie and Kara.

Fortunately, it wasn’t a hard fight to have them brought along. It seemed like her conscriptors were happy for the able-bodied volunteers, in fact.

They were flown north by military plane, across the border to Halifax—inasmuch as there was still a border, anyway—and then east from there to St. John’s, Newfoundland. They spent a night in that strange micropolis, strained and overpopulated from when thousands had fled there, hoping the isolation and the cold climate could protect them from the spread of the virus. And then, the next morning, they were bustled onto a helicopter that took them still further east, far out into the Atlantic, to—

“Is that an offshore oil rig?” Maggie asked.

“Used to be,” said one of the paramilitary guys. “Decomissioned back before COdA. We’re converting it and others like it into havens, which are basically offshore research and supply stations where nerds like you can work on a cure with minimal risk of exposure. We’re gonna be manufacturing supplies out here, too—quarantine equipment, hospital tools, things like that, and distributing them through the hub at Halifax.”

“What if we don’t want to live here?” Alex asked.

The second paramilitary guy laughed as the helicopter slowed, aiming for a landing pad around the back of the station. “Tough luck,” he said. “You’re conscripted, and this is your base. Welcome to Deo.”

 

—

 

Alex’s tally was more than three rows long, the night that she and Lena sat together in her cabin. They passed a flask of  hooch, and Lena traced the lines of Alex’s tally in the wall. They sat with their shoulders touching, their backs against the edge of the bed, their toes against the opposite wall, by the door.

They told stories. Lena talked about her childhood in impossibly vast mansions, about living out COdA in a remote luxury cabin in the Rockies. Her brother and mother were already trying to figure out how to weaponize the virus.

Alex talked about living on the coast, about surfing and nearly flunking out of grad school and about the annoying adoptive sister dropped in her lap as a teenager who would become so very, very important to her.

She told the story of falling in love with Maggie.

It felt good, to surround herself with thoughts of Maggie. Most of the time, Alex focused on trying to think of anything _but_ Maggie. The slightest things could send her into a spiral of memories: picking up a pair of Maggie’s socks from the drawer would make her think of taking those socks off of Maggie’s feet. Washing the sheets made her wish they smelled like Maggie’s skin instead of detergent pods. Eating alone made her wonder if, somewhere, Maggie was hungry.

So Alex told the story of falling in love with Maggie and let herself sink into it, into all the empty spaces filled by her memory, and it was cathartic in the way that pressing a bruise could feel good. She embraced the pain she worked so hard to try to suppress. She made company of it.

Lena tried to tell the story of falling in love with Kara. She tried, but found she couldn’t finish: “She’s _everything_ ,” Lena gasped, like the words had been kicked from her, “she’s all I have, my entire world.”

It had been months; Kara and Maggie had left in the long days of summer, and now Alex and Lena slept alone through the cold nights of winter.

Their fingers brushed as they passed the flask.

Somehow, in the swirling thick of drink and darkness, Lena’s mouth found Alex’s mouth, and Alex’s hand found the curve of Lena’s ribs. Alex’s hands sought more bones and softer angles, Lena’s mouth sought different skin. They scrambled up into the bed.

It was loneliness and fear that drove them, that night, into the arms of the only other person who shared their pain.

After, Lena sat up and tucked the sheet tight around her chest. Alex straightened the hem of her shirt that had never come all the way off.

Lena started to cry.

Alex reached for her, pulled her down so they could lie together, and Lena came willingly. She let Alex tuck the blanket around them both.

Alex couldn’t cry. If Alex started crying now, she’d never stop, she was sure of it. That’s what the tally was for: to tell her when she was allowed to start crying. So she let Lena’s sobs shake her body, let them exorcise something vicariously from her. And when Lena fell asleep, Alex didn’t wake her.

In the morning, groggy and hungover, they dressed without concern for each other’s nudity under the bright halogen overhead light.

“I’m not sorry for what we did,” Lena said.

“Neither am I,” Alex replied.

“But this isn’t us. This isn’t who we are to each other.”

“No. And it’s not who I want us to be.”

Lena smiled. “I’ll see you at the lab after breakfast?”

Alex smiled. “Yeah.”

Lena’s hand was on the door handle, the door half-opened, when Alex stopped her. “Kara isn’t all you have, you know.”

Lena turned.

“You love my sister,” Alex said, “and she loves you. And she’s not _all_ I have, but she and Maggie are both missing right now, so—”

“You understand,” Lena said, her voice gentle. “I know you do.”

“Yeah. So I mean, maybe we’re not…” Alex gestured vaguely at the still-rumpled sheets on the bed. Looking at them like that made something in her gut clench, made her remember soft morning smiles after nights of slow, thick sweetness; long black hairs left clinging to the pillowcase; a dimpled smile that could make Alex forget that they were living through the end of the world.

Maggie’s absence in the room was a presence in itself, and it made Alex feel all that much colder for remembering the lack of her warmth. She had shivered, last night, under the thin blanket, even with Lena lying with her.

God, she was lonely.

“But you’re the love of my sister’s life,” she said to Lena. “And I think—I hope—that makes us a family. Whether…”

Whether Kara came back, or not. Whether Kara was alive, or not. Whether all Alex had left of Maggie was this haunting, empty space, or not. At least, perhaps, Alex and Lena could agree: they didn’t have to think of themselves as _alone._

Lena smiled again, but this time, finally, it approached her eyes. “I’d like that, Alex.”

And so, from that moment, family they were.

 

—

 

Kara was naturally immune to the plague.

She’d been immune to COdA, too.

It had been a terrifying discovery. She’d had dinner at a restaurant with her boyfriend, James, and the next day had been contacted and informed that a cook had started showing symptoms.

By that night, James had started showing symptoms, too.

James was not a man who succumbed easily to tears, but he cried when he realized what was happening to him. Kara had wanted to reach for him, to comfort him, but he threw himself away from her, away from her hands. “Don’t touch me,” he’d cried, “not if you’re not showing symptoms, too.”

She stayed in his house, nursing him as best she could without risking contagion, until he insisted she call emergency services and have him put into quarantine.

She had never sobbed so hard as she had the day he was taken. Two days later, she received notice that he was gone.

But through all this,  Kara was physically fine. She spent every day waiting for the symptoms to appear—the cough, the fever, the twitching, the nosebleeds. At the worst of her grief, she wondered if that would be a bad thing; she and James had imagined a future together; kids and a dog and everything. But despite the impossible odds, no symptoms ever appeared.

She called Alex, who was down on the research base.

“Your food and drink must not have been contaminated,” Alex said. “Maybe another cook on the line made your dinner.”

“I had bites of his, though,” Kara said, “and I had a taste of his beer. And, I mean—Alex, we had _sex_ that night, and then I spent three days trying to take care of him. So if he was infected, I should be too, right?”

Alex sighed. “I don’t know. Yes. Probably.”

A week after James died, Kara showed up at Alex’s research station, her face still reddened and haggard with her grief.

“Test me,” she said, rolling up her sleeve for the needle. “Please.”

And Alex had sighed, and rolled her eyes, and done it—because what harm could there possibly be?

But then, to Alex’s surprise, Kara had antibodies for the COdA infection, which meant she had been exposed—but her white blood cells responded to Alex’s tests with a ferocity that Alex had never seen. Alex tested Kara’s blood, and tested it again, but despite the evidence of exposure, the viral load in every single sample was zero.

Then, that night, she snuck Kara back into her lab and took a pint of her blood.

Every month, Kara would come up with a reason to travel to Alex’s research station, where she’d donate another pint of blood. Alex’s research partner, a young hotshot named Winn, was let in on the secret, but nobody else. Not even Maggie.

From Kara’s blood—her miraculous, impossible blood—they developed the cure, and then the vaccine.

When the new plague hit, Kara presented herself, unannounced, at Alex’s lab. She stuck out her arm. “Test me.”

And again: she was immune.

“We’re not letting the world get devastated like it did last time,” Kara said. “I’m turning myself in.”

“I know how these organizations work,” Alex had growled, teeth gritted against the fear in her chest. “If they find out about you, they will throw you in a box and you will never see the light of day again. They’ll take more of your blood than you can safely give. They’ll pump you full of vaccine prototypes. You will not own yourself anymore, Kara. Your body will belong to the greater good.”

“It's the end of humanity, Alex!” Kara pressed. “Maybe I _should_ belong to the greater good!”

“Not yet!” Alex had insisted. “Just… let me work on it for awhile. Give me a chance, before you martyr yourself.”

Kara agreed. A week later, they were taken to Deo Haven, and Alex had insisted that Kara come along. But for the first weeks there, Kara had told Alex over and over and over again that she wanted to turn herself over to the Haven’s Major.

It was only meeting Lena, and falling in love with Lena, that caused Kara to finally stop talking about it.

(Alex had asked the Haven leadership to find Winn.

They’d already looked, they told her.

He’d survived COdA only to die of the new plague, and Alex was shocked by the depth of her grief. She sobbed until she retched, that night in the cabin she shared with Maggie, and Maggie had held her so tightly, had kept the pieces of her together when they had so desperately wanted to shatter.

But still, in the long term, Alex was relieved. Because if she’d had Winn, she wouldn’t have had Lena. And without Lena, Kara would surely have sacrificed herself long ago.)

Kara’s silence meant that she was expected to work, just like everyone on the Haven had to work.

Alex never left the Haven. She was the local doctor, but more often she worked in the lab with Lena. They were a good fit. Alex was a doctor and a medical researcher, and Lena was a molecular engineer; Alex could identify avenues to attack the virus and Lena could figure out ways to manufacture the compounds they wanted to test.

Kara and Maggie always travelled together on their supply runs, and Alex got some comfort from this knowledge. Because Kara was immune to the plague but she wasn’t immune to bullets or shivs or vehicle accidents or drowning, and Maggie, with her military training, could help her to navigate the violence she would encounter in the city.

And if Maggie were infected, well.

Kara could do more than anyone else to get Maggie home to Alex in some form or another.

This was the hope that Alex clung to when she let herself cling to hope: that one of them would find a way to bring the other home to her.

 

—

 

On the first day of the fifth row of Alex’s tally, it happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Peevish plot point for some readers: Alex/Lena grief-fuelled hookup at a time when Kara and Maggie have been missing for months and are presumed to be dead.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Totally unrealistic medical stuff this chapter. Like, if you are a medical professional, you will probably facepalm frequently. But it was inspired by elements of the game and necessary for the story I wanted to tell, so I hope you'll roll with me.
> 
> CW at the bottom of the page.
> 
> As always, this chapter is made 100000000% better by [Kelinswriter's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter) incredible editorial eye.

The Haven alarm sounded partway through the morning, alternating short and long blasts. It was the cue to get into hazmat suits as quickly as possible. 

It was only the second or third time Alex had ever heard it. She and Lena dropped their tools and pulled their hazmat kits from the locker in the back of the lab, stuffing fresh canisters into the air filtration units, when loud, clunking footsteps came barrelling along the outdoor walkway.

“Doc! Doctor Danvers! Doc!”

Alex turned as someone barged through the door. He was a teenager who had returned just a few days earlier from a mainland run. He wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit.

“Kid,” she growled, “come here. Get suited.” She tossed him a spare kit.

He caught just before he doubled over, panting to catch his breath.

“Maj—Major said to get you,” he gasped. “Double red flag incoming from the east.”

Alex inhaled. Red flags indicated an exposed or contaminated crew, one flag for every person on board, and as the Haven doctor, it would fall to her to manage and contain them when they arrived. The stakes were high not just for the patients, but for the Haven; a single instance of fluid contact with an infected person could trigger an outbreak that would take everyone with it. And of course, that single instance of contact could be her, by way of a nick or a poorly-closed zipper on her suit. 

She grabbed two extra hazmat kits and glanced at Lena, who met her gaze squarely, unafraid.

They began to dress faster.

 

—

 

They made their way to the east end dock, pressing through the crowds of people in bulky suits who were gathering there.

“Alex,” Lena said. She grasped at Alex’s shoulder through the thick rubber gloves on her hands. “Al—Al—Alex—“

She pointed past Alex’s shoulder at the boat speeding toward them. It was a super-fast boat, maybe thirty feet long and low with an open top; the kind of thing favoured by pirates and rich thrillseekers. 

The driver had long blonde hair. 

 

—

 

Alex was not ranked for first contact. She was supposed to wait at the top of the ladder for the ensigns to bring up the patients, and then begin her care as they carried the sick to her surgery.

Alex did not give a fuck about her rank in this moment.

She sprinted to the ladder and down, Lena right behind her. The speedboat was dwarfed by the long cargo dock, but as the pilot reached across and began to loop the ropes into the anchor points, Alex felt like her heart had stopped.

First, elation: it was Kara. Which meant that by the grace of anyone listening, the second person on the boat should be Maggie.

Then horror: two red flags. One would be for Kara, by protocol, since nobody knew that Kara was immune. But the other—oh, god, the other must be—

From the deck above, a sergeant yelled something down at her, the sound of the waves beating against the dock muting the tone of his rage. She neither heard nor cared what he said as she dropped to the dock and sprinted, Lena right behind her. 

Somewhere above them, more boots clanked down the metal ladder.

“Kara,” Alex gasped. “Kara.”

Kara’s eyes met hers. She looked ten years older than the last time they’d seen each other, and brutally exhausted, and all Alex wanted to do was to draw her into her arms. 

But they had to keep up appearances. Alex fought the impulse to reach for her sister, her healthy, plague-immune sister, and forced herself to hand over one of the hazmat kits. 

Then she inhaled. “Are you both—“

“Yeah,” Kara breathed. “She’s below. But Alex!”

Alex froze, one leg already over the boat’s railing.

“It’s bad, Alex. If you touch her, you’ll need to be decontaminated before you can be anywhere near anybody healthy.”

The thump of one set of boots, then another, landing on the dock from the ladder.

“Doctor Danvers!” an ensign called, his voice hollowed by his ventilation mask. “You’re under orders from the Major to get back up on deck!”

Another voice, a hand on her shoulder.

Lena. Alex had forgotten her for a moment.

“We mustn’t— Alex, we can’t do anything here. We can only help upstairs.”

Even through the plexiglass of their masks, Alex could see the tension in Lena’s eyes, and she knew that Lena longed to reach for Kara with all the force that she did, perhaps more. And Lena knew how desperately Alex longed to lay eyes on Maggie.

But Lena’s hand closed around Alex’s arm. “Let’s go.”

On the deck, ensigns were directing the Haven staff to disperse to their quarters until further notice. Kara and Maggie would be laid on gurneys in their hazmat suits, and then covered with a sterile sheet, and then all of it—the gurneys, the patients, the ensigns pushing the gurneys—would go through a sanitation chamber. 

They shuffled Kara immediately into a hermetically-sealed quarantine chamber, where she would spend the next forty-eight hours under watch for signs of infection.

Maggie was shuffled straight into the surgery. 

“This one’s bad,” an ensign said, and pulled the sheet off the second gurney.

Those eyes, the ones Alex knew better than she knew most parts of herself, were yellowed, the skin around them waxen, the lines around them deeper than they’d been the last time Alex had kissed them.

“Hey, Danvers.” Maggie’s voice was dry and cracked and hollow-sounding through the mask, and Alex was grateful for it, because those were the details that kept her from thinking this was yet another dream.

Alex laid her hand on the side of Maggie’s mask, with its god-awful ventilators and plexiglass and sheet plastic, and bent as close as she could. “Hi.”

“I’m—I’m pretty messed up, babe.” Her eyes reddened, a flush of colour on her pallid face, and they turned watery. Something glistened on her eyelashes, but her eyes stayed wide, locked on Alex’s as though they were a mirage that would disappear if she blinked. “I don’t think you can—“

“Hush,” Alex said. Through her gloves, through the suit, she felt the shape of Maggie’s ear, and slipped her fingers down to the hollow below it, where, so long ago now, she would rub to help Maggie fall asleep. “You let me be the judge of that.”

Near them, Lena talked the ensigns through stuffing the sheets into the autoclave, and gave them instructions on how to seal the room on their way back out into the sanitation chamber.

Alone, finally alone, Alex and Lena began to open Maggie’s suit. 

Her skin was grey and clammy, her body thinner than it had been when she’d left all those months ago, but apart from that, she looked okay, Alex thought. She had imagined this kind of situation, when she had let herself imagine Maggie coming home. She could nurse Maggie up from being underweight. She could hold her in bed to make sure she slept.

Lena pulled off Maggie’s mask and tucked her hair into a net while Alex worked the suit off her wiry arms.

And then Alex laid a hand on Maggie’s left thigh, and Maggie howled like she’d been branded.

Alex’s hand jerked away. Maggie panted, her fingernails carving into her palms, and Lena laid a hand over her forehead to soothe her, even as she met Alex’s eyes, her brow furrowed.

Alex cut the rest of the hazmat suit off of Maggie, scarcity be damned, and wondered how Maggie had taken so long to start screaming; how she had made it through the hoist up from the dock, through the decontamination, through the long trip across the water with a leg that looked necrotic, tourniquet tight above her knee.

Bile surged in Alex’s throat, and pressure surged to the backs of her eyes, and her diaphragm spasmed up against the backs of her lungs, but Alex swallowed all of it. She pressed all of it to stillness, and she looked up to meet the horror in Lena’s eyes.

“We need morphine,” she said, “and we need a blood draw for a viral load count, and we need a line in for anaesthesia. You get the morphine, I’ll get the needles. Good?”

Lena nodded.

They began.

 

—

 

Twelve hours later, Maggie slept off the anaesthetic in a quarantine chamber, and Alex sat on the floor outside its glass door, watching her.

From this angle, Maggie looked like she might have been sleeping off a flu. She looked thin, and hollow, and still, but otherwise like herself.

From this angle, Alex couldn’t see the stump where Maggie’s left leg used to be. 

For the fifth, tenth, hundredth time since she’d sat down here, she contemplated letting herself into Maggie’s room. She wanted to kneel by Maggie’s cot so that she’d be the first thing Maggie saw when she opened her eyes. She wanted to wipe the sweat from Maggie’s face, to comb back her hair when the anaesthesia recovery made her nauseous, to hold her when she realized her leg was gone. Instead, Maggie would have to do all of that for herself. 

Surely Maggie could not have expected to keep her leg. Surely she had to have known that the only way to save her would be to take it off. The gangrene alone had demanded it. 

But if Alex entered the quarantine chamber without a hazmat suit, if she touched Maggie’s sweat or spit, she’d be trapped in there with her for the duration of the quarantine. And of course she, herself, would almost undoubtedly contract the virus, and then they’d both be trapped in there for as long as it would take them to recover, or more likely, to die. 

The tourniquet had done its job. Maggie had been infected with the plague virus, apparently through a small cut on her ankle. The tissue death appeared to have slowed the viral reproduction. Her blood sample showed a viral presence, but one low enough that her immune system appeared to be keeping it in check, at least for now. 

It was conceivable that she could recover. It could happen from time to time, just like rare people survived ebola or hantavirus.

Of course, most of those survivors had not just lost a limb.

But most people also didn’t have access to Maggie’s drip cocktail of antibiotics, antivirals, and the best immune therapy the world had yet developed. It was Lena and Alex’s latest endeavour, and only in the prototype stage. They gave it to Maggie anyway.

Lena was just down the hall, her forehead pressed to the glass of Kara’s quarantine chamber, speaking in quiet tones through the microphone. Alex could see the shadow of Kara pressed close to the glass, too. She imagined they could feel the warmth of each other through it; touch, just barely removed until, in two days, Kara’s viral load would test negative and she’d be allowed out.

Alex looked back at Maggie and forced herself not to wonder anything.

“Alex,” Lena said. “Come. Say hello to your sister.”

When Alex looked over, Lena’s eyes looked clear and sharp and happy for the first time in months and months. Alex was happy for her, and jealous of her, and wanted desperately to see Kara’s face clearly, but she couldn’t handle the thought of leaving Maggie alone.

“Okay,” she said. “Lena, would you—I hate to ask, but—“

Something in Lena’s eyes shifted, her elation slipping through sadness and settling on gentle understanding. Her lips tightened, as though she were trying not to frown. “Of course I’ll sit with Maggie,” she said. “Of course.”

Alex exhaled in relief. But where their paths crossed, midway between the two chambers, they both paused.    


“Did you…” Alex swallowed. “Did tell her? About...” She gestured vaguely between them. 

Lena shook her head. “Not yet. I thought she should probably sleep first. Eat some good food.”

“Yeah.” Alex nodded. And then: “Let me.”

Lena tensed. Her eyes narrowed, and Alex could tell she was trying to decide whether Alex was offering a gift or putting herself on the block. “Why?”

“So I can take the blame if she gets angry.”

“Alex—“

“You make her so happy, Lena,” Alex sighed. “I want to protect that for her. And for you.”

Lena stood still, looking Alex in the eye, and finally let her shoulders drop. “All right.”

In her quarantine chamber, Kara stood with her palm pressed to the glass, and Alex pressed her palm to Kara’s.

Kara looked older and exhausted. The dark circles under her eyes were the kind that grew from exhaustion, but they looked like bruises, like marks of violence. The ends of her hair looked ragged, hastily chopped off, perhaps with a knife. 

She had always been thin, but she’d never looked so close to emaciated. 

The sight of her still made Alex want to cry. 

With her free hand, Alex fumbled for the speaker button, and then she pressed her forehead to the glass. 

“You survived,” she said, and the tears were coming now. “You survived, and you came home to me.”

“I did,” Kara said. She pressed her forehead to Alex’s, through the glass. “ _ We  _ did.”

The door at the end of the hall opened, then closed.  “Dr. Danvers?”

Alex turned. Just inside the door, an ensign hovered, holding a covered tray.

“I brought the meal you ordered,” she said. “There’s some soup here, and some bread, and the cook snuck in a little chicken when he heard it was for someone in quarantine.”

Alex wiped at her wet eyes and straightened. The ensign couldn’t be more than fifteen, Alex thought; she should have been off learning trigonometry somewhere, not delivering mess hall meals to crying adults. But here they were.

She thanked the girl and dismissed her. Then she pushed the tray into the transfer box on Kara’s quarantine cell. It sealed, and then she heard a click as the window opened on Kara’s side. 

Kara groaned when she took the lid off, loud enough for Alex to hear without the help of the microphone, and tore off an enormous bite of bread before she even bothered to move the tray to the floor with her.

Alex thumbed the speaker button. “Don’t eat too fast.”

Kara, chipmunk-cheeked with her mouth full of bread and chicken, only nodded, without looking up from her food. 

Again, Alex’s diaphragm tightened, something sharp and hard wanting to break itself free. Because Kara had always loved food, had never tried to disguise it, but Alex had never seen her eat like someone who had been starving.

This was her second meal, not her first, since arriving at the Haven. The first had been delivered to her while Alex was still in surgery with Maggie. 

Alex pressed the microphone button again. “Kara, when was the last time you ate before you got here?”

Kara shrugged. She was holding her soup bowl in both hands now, sipping from it directly, her spoon untouched on the tray. As she chewed and swallowed the noodles, she held up two fingers.

“Two days?” Alex asked.

Kara nodded and then paused, seeming to think for a minute. Then she tipped the bowl to her lips again with one hand, and held up three fingers with the other. 

“ _ Three _ days?”

Kara nodded, then shrugged, and held up two fingers again, raising and lowering the third quickly.

Alex didn’t know what was worse: that Kara hadn’t eaten for two or three days, or that Kara couldn’t even remember how many days it had been since she’d last eaten.

When she was finished, she set the tray back in the transfer box. She heard the unit seal, heard the hiss of the air being cycled out, and then the click of the outer door unlocking, where Alex could slip it directly into a bag she could seal and take for sterilization.

Kara leaned on the glass again, pawing at the microphone button.

“Alex, I’m so tired,” she said, like it was a discovery.

“I know.” Alex could feel Kara’s exhaustion like it was her own. Her body felt vicariously heavy, her joints weak. “Go to sleep. We’ll talk when you wake up, or in the morning.”

Kara nodded. Then she said, almost shyly, “Lena?”

Alex smiled. “I’ll get her.”

As Lena murmured into Kara’s microphone, Alex stood with her palms pressed to the glass between her body and the place where Maggie lay, stiff and sallow. She busied herself by checking the IV bags that hung where she could reach them, their lines running through the wall. Everything looked fine, tracking well, but she fiddled with them anyway because touching these lines made her feel like she was  _ doing  _ something in this moment when there was nothing, not a single thing, that she could actually do that she hadn’t done—

Movement, in the corner of her eye.

Alex looked through the glass, and yes: Maggie’s hand shifted, and then her jaw, and then she swallowed. The fidgeting hand came up and rested on her stomach. There were scabs on the back of that hand, across the knuckles and the back of the palm.

And then Maggie’s body jolted up. But it was off-balance; it didn’t know how to sit with one leg, and it keeled to the side before Maggie caught herself, clumsily, with a hand on the edge of the bed. She looked disoriented and mostly asleep and Alex knew the green, dizzy face of nausea, though whether the nausea was a result of the anaesthesia or the infection, she did not know.

She jabbed the microphone. “Maggie. Maggie, sweetie, there’s a bucket. On the floor beside you, there’s a bucket.’

Maggie was beautiful and so, so strong, because even through the sickness and the drugs and the disorientation, she heard Alex speak. Alex could see the recognition in her eyes and Maggie’s hand fumbled down for the bucket. But it was too low, and Maggie’s body was strange and unfamiliar and she listed hard again, only barely catching herself before falling out of the cot—

She had tried, she had tried so hard, but she couldn’t reach the bucket in time.

Alex, standing helplessly on the other side of the glass, sobbed.

“Alex?” Lena said, running up to her. “Alex, what’s—“

But then she saw.

Maggie was still so drugged, propped on her elbows, that she just stared down at her soiled sheets like they were a distant thing.

“I have to go in,” Alex said. “I know I’m not supposed to but I can’t just leave her—“

“Of course you can’t.” Lena pushed her gently. “Go get a kit on and get some clean sheets. I’ll watch her while you do.”

Alex tore her eyes from Maggie and left to suit up. 

When she let herself into Maggie’s chamber, Maggie had laid back down, She seemed detached, unbothered, but hyper-aware, like a person who’d found herself sprinting but couldn’t remember what had been chasing her.

“Maggie?” Alex said quietly, and prayed that, in this state, Maggie would recognize her voice through the suit ventilator.

Maggie’s eyes meandered up and she stared at Alex’s head, like the sight of a hazmat suit was no more remarkable than the sight of her own left hand.

“This feels bad,” Maggie slurred.

Alex crouched beside Maggie and pressed a hand to her forehead. She imagined the silicone gloves would feel thick and distant on Maggie’s skin, but she sought whatever closeness she could find. The reality of the day settled on Alex’s shoulders: just a few hours ago, she had  _ amputated Maggie’s leg _ . It had, in the moment, been easier than she had expected, to think of the blackened flesh as something extraneous, something outside-Maggie that must be removed to save her, like cutting out a tumor. Now, though, in a rush, Alex remembered massaging the back of that thigh after long shifts on the beat, she remembered tickling that foot when she felt playful, she remembered the countless times that knee hooked itself over her hip and drew her body tight against Maggie’s.  

She had amputated Maggie’s leg and now Maggie was being infused with a pint of Lena’s blood, because Lena’s blood type was compatible and Alex’s was not.

So much of medicine was about inflicting controlled harm to mitigate the impacts other forces of damage on bodies. Alex knew this, had been taught it in medical school ethics courses, but she had never been so aware of how fine the line between healing and violence as she had today as she tried to control how much she allowed Maggie to bleed. She walked that line on Maggie’s body, which meant so much more to her than even her own. Her hands on Maggie were gentle now, soothing, to try to offset the day’s brutal but necessary harm.

Maggie stretched down with her left hand, fumbling and looking for something under the blankets.

Looking for her leg under the blankets.

“Burns,” she said. 

Alex hummed. Phantom pain was to be expected, and there wasn’t much she could do about it. She stilled Maggie’s hand against bed and then slipped her fingers around Maggie’s palm and squeezed. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

She stripped Maggie’s soiled blanket and quickly checked her dressing before laying the clean blanket over her. That, at least, looked dry and clean. Halfway through the process Maggie surged with nausea again but this time Alex was there to help her, though her soothing words sounded harsh and metallic through the ventilator.

When Maggie was done, Alex sealed everything dirty into a bag to be taken for laundry and sterilization.

But Maggie was awake now. Alex perched on the edge of her cot, hip to hip, and pushed sweaty strands of hair from Maggie’s face.“How do you feel?”

Maggie blinked, avoiding Alex’s eyes, but said nothing for a long time.

“M’leg’s gone,” she said, finally.

Alex nodded. “Yeah, sweetie. You—you were so brave, what you did. You...” Alex swallowed. “You gave yourself a chance.”

“Had to see you again,” Maggie said quietly. “Had to tell you I love you.”

Why did it hurt to breathe? Alex wasn’t sick, and yet. She inhaled as hard as she could but the air moved like a wave around a rock, forked and violent. “I love you too.”

Alex helped Maggie sit up, and helped her sip water, and helped her to lay back down again.

Maggie had always been a terrible patient. She hated being sick; she hated resting, she hated being cared for. When Alex would make her soup or run her a bath, she would scowl even while eating or soaking.

To have Maggie so pliable, like this, so willing to be helped, felt like insult over injury.

Maggie lay down and slept again. And Alex sat on the floor beside her cot, holding her hand, until Lena rapped on the window.

She was holding a pillow and a blanket in one hand, and not for the first time, Alex understood why Kara loved her so much.

Lena leaned toward the microphone. “It’s late,” she said.

Alex nodded. She hadn’t known. There were no windows here. But the day felt like it had begun years ago.

Maggie slept deeply enough not to be disturbed by Lena on the microphone, or by Alex standing, or by the way Alex traced her eyebrows, nose, lips, before tearing herself away and out the back entrance, into the decontamination room.  

It took ten minutes to get herself sanitized, out of the hazmat suit, and around to the hallway where Lena waited, not with one blanket and pillow, but with two.

“I’m not letting Kara out of my sight,” Lena said. “I assumed you’d feel the same.”

The pillow and blanket were Alex’s own, taken from her bed, and Alex clutched them fiercely to her chest: the first things she’d put her hands on all day that she didn’t need to fear breaking. She hugged them so tightly her arms shook.

She lay with her body pressed to the glass, as close to Maggie as she could be, and did not sleep at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blood, needles, general medical grossness though I have endeavoured not to make it too graphic.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe slightly NSFW. Nothing super explicit, but better safe than sorry.
> 
> As always, huuuuuge shout-out to @Kelinswriter for calling me out on runaway italics and other exercises in lazy writing.

Their first night in National City after the COdA pandemic, Alex and Maggie stayed at Kara’s in the apartment that used to be Alex’s. It used to be Alex’s, but Kara was living there now.

Kara had gone to Seattle to cover a story, and while she was gone, there had been a riot in her neighborhood. She had come home to find her whole block in shambles, her building looted. Her apartment had been raided, clothes strewn everywhere, her few valuables stolen. So she had gritted her teeth, found some reusable shopping bags that were serviceable, and packed up the things she could find that were important to her. Mementos, keepsakes, photographs, an ancient laptop that, she hoped, might have copies of some of the pictures that were on the newer desktop that had been stolen.  

She checked her keyring for the spare key, strapped everything to the back of her motorcycle—the one that she’d only bought because Alex had one, but that was fast and nimble and far better than a car could ever be in the current state of the roads— and, for lack of any other options, moved into Alex’s apartment.

She told this to Alex, of course, on her next trip to Alex’s lab.

“Just for a little while,” she said, “until I find somewhere new.”

Alex just smiled and shook her head. Kara was lying on a gurney, a needle in her arm, filling yet another pint bag with her rare, perfect blood.

“Stay as long as you want,” Alex said. “It’s so silly to try to go house hunting right now when there’s a perfectly good apartment sitting empty.”

Kara had blustered, insisting that no, of course she wouldn’t just  _ move in  _ to Alex’s apartment. 

But the weeks turned into months, and Kara’s job was relentless, and so when Alex and Maggie found themselves standing outside the apartment door, hand in hand with duffel bags over their shoulders, Alex had not been surprised to hear music from inside, and the sound of something cooking.

She had her key in hand, but she tucked it back into her pocket and knocked instead.

The music turned down, and then footsteps approached the door and paused. Kara was checking the peephole.

Then the door opened and Kara flung herself through it, diving into Alex’s arms. When Maggie tried to offer her a hand to shake, Kara rolled her eyes and pushed past it, hugging Maggie too. They had met on the base on a few of Kara’s many visits, but only in passing.   
  
Kara had been indignant about that. She’d been lying on a gurney, Alex prodding at the veins of her elbow, when she said so. “She’s making you so happy, Alex! She’s teaching you so much about yourself! Why can’t I get to know her?”

“It’s too new,” Alex had said, frowning. She pulled off the tourniquet and went to check Kara’s other arm. “You need to drink more water. You’re dehydrated.”

“Stop trying to change the subject.”

“I’m not. Wait a minute.”   
  
Kara lay quietly while Alex found a vein she liked and got the IV started, and then slid back on her rolling chair and snapped off her nitrile gloves. 

“Well?” Kara asked. “I know you’re serious about her.”   
  
“I am,” Alex agreed. “But not more serious than I am about you. I don’t think she’d narc us out, but I don’t want to find out the hard way that I’m wrong.”   
  
“She doesn’t have to know.”   
  
“The risk is too high, Kara. If it comes down to your life or hers, I don’t know which she’d choose. Her not knowing protects both of you.”   


Kara hadn’t been able to argue with that.   
  
So when Maggie stood at the door to Alex’s, now Kara’s, apartment, Kara hugged her like they were family. “I can’t wait to, like, get to know you for real,” she said.    


When Maggie went to the bathroom, Kara leveled a glare at Alex. “You brought her home with you?”

Alex blushed. 

“We’re telling her,” Kara said. “The disease is cured, the pandemic is over. We’re telling her.”   


In the kitchen, Kara browned more meat for the bolognese she was cooking, and she boiled enough pasta for the three of them.

“You cook now?” Alex asked.

Kara shrugged. “Everything’s been so unpredictable,” she said. “It felt like a survival skill I needed to master.”

The room had been rearranged a bit. Kara had always hated rooms oriented around the TV, so she’d turned the sofa to face the kitchen and moved the armchair closer to the door. There was a second armchair there, too; Alex recognized it as one that must have survived the looting at Kara’s old place.

“I’m sorry, I really meant to be out of here,” Kara said. “It’s just been so busy, and this place is close to CatCo. But if you just give me a few days, I’ll find a new apartment and be out of your hair.”

Alex thought about it for a few moments, chewing her pasta, and said, “You know what? You can keep this place, if you want.”

Kara’s eyebrows shot up. “What? No, Alex, this is your home.”

“Right, it was my home.” Alex stretched a hand across the table, reaching for Maggie. “It might be nice to start fresh in a place that’s going to be _our_ home. We could choose it together, decorate it together.”

Maggie’s eyes went wide, and Alex noticed the way she stuffed another bite of food into her mouth to try to contain her grin. Her fingers wrapped tight around Alex’s. 

And so, a week later, they set the pieces of Alex’s sectional—the one that didn’t really fit in Kara’s new layout of Alex’s old place—in the middle of their new living room, and sat on it while they waited for their new bedframe and mattress to be delivered.

“I still can’t believe you want a bed that big.” Maggie laughed. “What are we going to do, sleep like starfish every night and still not touch each other?”

“Maybe,” Alex said, grinning, “If we want to. That’s the whole point: we could, if we wanted to!”

Maggie smirked and crawled closer to Alex on the couch. “I did not agree to move to National City with you to not touch you in bed.”

“I know,” Alex said, mock-serious. “You came to start cheering for the better WNBA team.” 

“Oh, you did not just!” Maggie laughed, and then she pounced, tackling Alex down onto the couch cushions and straddling her. “Take it back!”

Alex pursed her lips and cocked an eyebrow and enunciated, very clearly, “Go. Tidal. Go.”

“Now you’ve done it,” Maggie said, and started honest-to-god  _ tickling  _ her.

Alex gasped and giggled and with a sudden lurch, managed to throw Maggie off both herself and the couch. With a twist, Maggie managed to land on her feet, hopping back just as Alex dove for her. Alex chased her toward the kitchen island, around it, and back toward the couch, where they ducked and weaved from opposite sides until, without warning, Maggie surged straight over the top. Alex was laughing so hard she was gasping, barely able to open her eyes or to fight back when Maggie’s arms wrapped around her waist and dragged her to the floor. She found her breath again when Maggie kissed her, drawing Alex’s body on top of her and into the cradle of her hips. They kissed deeply, and deeper still, their chests pressed together, and their giddiness softened and thickened into something hotter and heavier. Alex tugged Maggie’s legs around her waist and ground down into her, and it was only the arrival of the mattress delivery that kept them from screwing right there on the floor.

That night, they lay together in the middle of their massive new bed, Maggie’s legs tangled with Alex’s, their heart rates easing.

“You know, I probably really will have to start rooting for the Tidal,” Maggie said.

Alex, confused, hummed her query into Maggie’s hair.

“Gotham was hit so much harder than National City,” Maggie said. “They say it’s a ghost town now. What are the chances the Gotham Night still even exist?”

“They’ll rebuild,” Alex said, her fingertips trailing down the groove of Maggie’s back, gathering sweat. She nudged at Maggie’s forehead with her chin, encouraging her to look up. “I’ll root for them with you when they do.”

 

—

 

The morning passed quietly. Lena went to the mess hall and brought breakfast back for Alex. 

(It was an unspoken agreement. Lena would get to hold Kara in her arms in just a few more days, after all, but Alex didn’t know if she’d ever get to hold Maggie again. So Lena ran the minor errands, and Alex stayed with Maggie, as close as she could.)

Maggie had woken up a few times in the night, had been restless, but she hadn’t thrown up anymore. That, at least, was a good sign: the nausea had been from the anaesthesia wearing off, then, and not from infection.

“How’s she doing?” Kara asked.

Alex inhaled and walked over to Kara’s compartment. Kara leaned against the glass, thumb on her microphone button.

“Hard to say,” Alex said. She leaned against the glass but looked down and to the side, at the bottom edge of the window. “No nosebleeds, no muscle spasms, so that’s really good. But her body would be under a lot of stress from the virus or the amputation alone, and she’s fighting both of those at once, so…” Alex pinched the bridge of her nose. A headache was creeping up on her, slipping up the back of her skull toward her temples.

“Do you think she could survive?” Kara asked. Something small and crinkled in her voice made Alex look up. Kara was rubbing her palm up and down her thigh, scraping her fingertips up and down, like she was trying to find solid ground under her own flesh. She fidgeted, shifting from foot to foot, and Alex had a sudden realization that Kara was worried for Maggie not just for Maggie’s sake, and not for Alex’s, but for her own.

Kara seemed to see the moment Alex came to understanding.

“I would be dead without her,” Kara said. “I’d have starved, or frozen, or gotten trapped in a rioting city. She’s so smart, she—sometimes she could just tell when something bad was going to happen, you know? And she’d get us out of it before it even started. I can’t imagine anyone, not a single person I would have preferred to be stuck out there with, except maybe you.”

Alex could imagine it, at least in the abstract: Maggie with her hair in a ponytail, poring over maps or reading a room, and hauling Kara to wherever they needed to go next. The image bundled something warm and heavy around her heart. 

“I wanted to give up,” Kara said. “Not often, but a few times. We were working so hard, and I just felt like we’d never get here. But she wouldn’t let me. She’d just grab me and say, ‘There’s a pretty girl waiting for you at Deo Haven. She’s  _ waiting _ for you. And your sister is waiting for you, and you owe it to both of them to get up and get home to them. You are not allowed to give up.’ And it worked. Every time.”

They stood for a moment, quiet and still with the silence around them. Kara reached a clenched fist forward and thumped it gently on the glass. Her movement was tense; it seemed throttled, as though Kara had wanted to lash out harder, but had restrained herself. 

“She can’t have survived everything we got through only to die now, Alex.” Kara’s voice climbed higher, thinning, the escalating sounds of panic. “She  _ can’t, _ Alex, she can’t—”

Alex pressed her palm to the glass between them and wished she knew what to say.

 

—

 

Alex felt the passage of time as something thin and sharp; a razorblade carving away different potential futures.

Maggie had started shifting around in bed sometime after Alex had eaten her breakfast. At first it had frightened Alex, who worried it was the beginning of the muscle twitches that signaled the progress of the virus’s neurotoxic phase. But Lena, who could look with a more objective eye, said that the movements weren’t jerky and random, but smooth and somewhat intentional: Maggie was slipping in and out of dreams. 

Later that morning, Alex suited up and went back into Maggie’s quarantine chamber. She wasn’t supposed to, but at that point she had already broken the rule once, and it was hard to imagine what anyone would do if they checked the access logs and found out. She was too valuable to the prospect of a cure. 

Alex was able to check Maggie’s pulse and temperature before all the manhandling woke her.

Alex had left the halogen overhead lights off, so the chamber was lit only by the light that came through from the hallway. It was dim enough that when Maggie woke, she was able to open her eyes comfortably. And after blinking a few times, she looked up at Alex with clarity.

“Hey, you,” Alex said, pushing Maggie’s hair back from her forehead.

Maggie’s mouth opened and closed a few times, tongue working, and Alex reached for the cup of water she’d brought in with Maggie’s breakfast. Maggie smiled a little, gratefully, as Alex helped her sit up enough to drink, and then to lay back down again.

“Am I dying?” Maggie rasped.

Alex swallowed. Maggie had a fever, but not one high enough to be dangerous. She wasn’t bleeding. She wasn’t twitching. She wasn’t struggling to breathe.

This, in itself, was miraculous, given the length of time since Maggie’s exposure to the virus.

“Not today,” Alex said. 

Maggie’s eyes closed in relief, and she exhaled. They sat like that for a few moments, Alex’s breaths rasping through the respirator, Maggie’s settling quietly into the room.

“Kara?” Maggie murmured.

“She’s fine. She’s in the next quarantine cell, keeping up appearances.”

Maggie nodded twice. “That’s good,” she said. Then: ”God, I’m really here. I thought I’d dreamed it.”

Alex smiled. “I haven’t slept since you got home, or I’d think I’d dreamed it, too.”

Maggie’s left hand fumbled down her blankets, over her hip, the top of her thigh, and—

She sighed. “I didn’t dream that either.”

“No, sweetie.” Alex found the fumbling hand and held it. “You were so brave. You did what you had to do. How’s your pain?”

“Maybe a four.”

Alex nodded. For someone who’d just lost a limb, that might be the best they could ask for.

Alex took Maggie’s blood pressure. Then, she helped her to sit up and lean against the wall so she could eat a little. Maggie wasn’t hungry, it was clear, but she ate a few bites of rice and eggs while Alex checked the drain and changed the dressing on her residual limb. Her flesh was bruised and swollen but otherwise healthy, with no signs of opportunistic infections.

It wasn’t until Alex was done that she looked up and noticed Maggie watching her. Then she looked at her stump, and looked at Alex again.

“I just wanted to come home,” Maggie said, but it sounded like she felt she had done something wrong. It broke Alex’s heart a little.

“I’m so grateful you did,” Alex said.

Alex re-dressed the sutures as gently as she could, watching Maggie’s flexing hands for signs of discomfort. Maggie wouldn’t make a sound, of course. That wasn’t how she handled pain. 

“Want to work on moving that good leg around a bit?” Alex asked, when the dressing was done. It was really just an excuse to justify staying in the chamber, though any effort to stave off muscle atrophy was a good use of their time. Alex studiously avoided thinking about prognoses; about the statistical near-impossibility that Maggie could survive this, and the equally improbable fact that she had already outlived her expectancy post-exposure. She focused on white walls, on Maggie’s stringy-looking hair, on the feeling of Maggie’s body through the gloves.

Maggie nodded, but did not speak. She braced her hands on the mattress and tried to scoot herself away from the wall. Alex reached for her, for her arm and shoulder, to help her, and Maggie flinched. Alex tried again and Maggie jerked away, intentionally this time.

“It’s fine, I can do it,” she said through gritted teeth. Alex doubted that was true, but she pulled her hands away all the same. 

In the end, Maggie couldn’t do it. Jaw set, she let Alex help her lie back down, and then let Alex steady her while she lifted and moved her good leg through a few exercises.

She let Alex pull the blanket over her when she collapsed, panting, into her pillow.

“You’re a badass, Sawyer,” Alex said.

Maggie wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Alex touched Maggie’s lips with her thumb. They were chapped and cracking, and they didn’t kiss her finger, but nor did they pull away. Alex wanted to kiss her. Wanted to do more than kiss her; wanted to do everything she could to make Maggie feel alive, and present, and close to her. 

The very first time they’d had sex, against the corrugated metal wall of the mess hall at that COdA research station, Maggie had offered the tips of her fingers to Alex’s lips. Alex had opened her mouth and drawn those fingers inside, as deep as they could go.

Maggie’s pupils blew wide and dark. “Jesus fuck,” she’d whispered, “are you even real?”    
  
They’d played like that for awhile, Maggie teasing Alex’s mouth with her fingers. Maggie’s jaw was slack with focus and arousal until she finally snapped, growling something unintelligible and shoving her other hand down the front of Alex’s pants. What came next was a revelation, for Alex. She had never before experienced what it felt like to be so wholly the center of another person’s attention. Nobody had ever taken such pleasure from giving such focus to the task of giving her pleasure. Maggie read her face, her eyes, her body, and gave her the most excruciatingly perfect orgasm she’d ever had in her life.   
  
She hadn’t told Maggie that she’d never slept with a woman before.

She didn’t tell her that until much later, when they’d graduated to using a cot. Maggie had been mortified.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. “I would have made it better for you, I would have tried to make you feel special—”

“You weren’t looking to make someone feel special that night,” Alex said dismissively. “And I wasn’t looking to be made special. We were both looking to get off on a warm body. And besides…” Alex slid a hand down under the covers and squeezed Maggie’s ass. “It was still the hardest I’d ever come before.”

Maggie grinned into her shoulder. “Was it, now?”

“It was.”

“Hmm.”

Maggie pushed up onto her elbows and shifted herself over Alex’s body. “How about you let me give you an honorary first time right now, soldier?” She teased Alex’s nipple with her thumb, and bit her lip when Alex gasped. “All the things I would have done then, if I’d known?” She slid that hand up toward Alex’s face and teased her lips.   
  
Alex, already halfway gone from Maggie's voice alone, sucked hard on Maggie’s thumb, and then bit it gently, and nodded. Her body arched up, offering itself. And then Maggie took her apart so gently, so tenderly, with those fingers and her mouth, that Alex sobbed through the end of her orgasm. And then Maggie scattered kisses across her cheeks and nose until Alex could find her breath again.   
  
Alex had known, then, that she felt something deeper than their friends-with-benefits arrangement probably advised.

Now, she touched Maggie’s lips through her gloves and let herself long for a new beginning, for a third first time together.

She let herself wish it for a moment before straightening up, squaring her shoulders, and letting herself back out into the decontamination room.

 

—

 

Hours passed with the hum of air through ventilation shafts, of the rasp of Alex’s breath echoing in the steel hallway, the scent of the sanitizing chemicals sitting in the back of her throat and giving shape to all her other senses. She went into Maggie’s chamber one more time that day, and again the following morning, but had to be careful not to use up hazmat kits so quickly that she ran out before they could be sterilized and returned to her. 

In her second trip, she jerry-rigged some tape and a piece of plastic to keep Maggie’s microphone active. Then she tried to nap a bit, pillow and blanket up against the glass, listening to the sound of Maggie’s breathing. From time to time, Lena would watch Maggie and Alex would sit with Kara and they would talk about nothing of substance. They would play  _ Twenty Questions _ , or  _ Who Am I? _

(Alex redirected away from a game of  _ Never Have I Ever _ .)

(She would tell Kara what happened with Lena. She  _ would _ . But not now, not like this, through glass, with Maggie on the edge.)

The night passed, and Alex slept a little. Maggie breathed steadily, and in the morning, her vitals were fine. She had a fever—had had one since the beginning—but Alex chose not to treat it, hoping the temperature would make Maggie’s body less hospitable to the virus.

In the morning, Alex and Lena stood together, watching Maggie through the glass. “Her condition is remarkable,” Lena said.

Alex nodded. “I know.”

“Something here must be working,” Lena pressed. “This is a big deal, Alex.”

Was it? Alex wasn’t sure. She couldn’t think that way, that far ahead, yet. 

“We’ll test her viral load this afternoon,” Alex said, “When the 48 hours are up.”

 

—

 

At 45 hours, Alex went through the charade of suiting up to take a sample of Kara’s blood.

It was unnecessary, of course. They both knew what the results would be but Alex needed the testing record in case the Major chose to audit her work. Kara’s viral load, of course, was clear. 

Still, the moment of opening Kara’s quarantine chamber felt like a moment of triumph. Alex brought the keys, and at 48 hours precisely, unlocked the door. Kara stumbled out and fell directly into Lena’s arms, and Alex turned away, trying to give them their privacy. Still, she could hear the murmur of whispers exchanged, the sounds of a few quick kisses. 

She leaned on the door to Maggie’s chamber, and her breaths synced to Maggie’s. She imagined her lungs pulling air for Maggie’s, keeping her alive.

A hand on her shoulder. “Alex.” And she turned.

She forgot, sometimes, that Kara was taller than her. In this moment, up close, she looked older, too. She had lost so much weight, and had lines around her eyes that had not been there before. 

But when Kara dove into Alex’s arms, she tucked herself low under Alex’s chin, made herself small, and Alex held her like she’d done when they were younger and Kara, new to their family, had been so easily afraid. 

Kara’s body shook and Alex clutched her tighter. And then Alex realized that Kara’s body wasn’t shaking on its own. it wasn’t Kara who was shaking, it wasn’t Kara who was crying.

“Shh. Hey. Hey. Shh, it’s okay.” Kara said. She straightened, and now Alex was the one to tuck herself low, make herself small. Kara held her up, murmuring nonsense sounds into her hair while Alex clutched at her shoulder blades and cried.

They stood like that until Alex could breathe normally again, and then a little longer while Alex pushed through the shame that she felt at breaking like this.

When they finally separated, Alex noticed that Lena had averted her eyes. Kara didn’t, though. Kara kissed her forehead as though she were the older sister, and then smiled at her, warm and soft. 

“Hey,” she said. 

Alex rolled her eyes and inhaled, trying to steady her breath.

Kara looked up, then, and looked past Alex to Maggie’s chamber. She stepped closer and laid a palm on the glass gently, as though Maggie herself could feel it.

“It’s been two days?” Kara asked.

“Yes,” Alex replied.

“She… she looks really good for two days. I mean, not just that she’s still alive, but—but  _ good _ .”

Alex could only nod.

Kara stepped back and skimmed the doorframe with her eyes, searching for the microphone button. “Where is the… ah.” She pressed it. “Maggie. Hey, Maggie.  _ Recon _ .” 

Maggie jolted awake like she’d been pinched, her eyes scanning the room almost frantically until they turned and settled on the glass, and then she relaxed.

“Kara,” she said, and smiled. “Hey. You’re out.”

“Yeah, Maggie, I’m out.” Kara leaned forward, one hand on the glass, and her voice was hard and strong and forceful in a way that Alex had never heard before. “You have to listen to me, okay? There’s a pretty girl waiting for you out here,” Kara said, and she sounded so aggressive that Alex wanted to quell her, to tell her not to be so hard on someone who was barely conscious.

But when Alex looked at Maggie, Maggie was smiling.

“‘s that so, Kara?” she asked, her lips quirked.

“Yeah, you idiot,” Kara said. “Alex is waiting for you out here. I am waiting for you. You did not stay alive this long just to die right now, right at the end. We’re waiting for you out here. So don’t you fucking dare disappoint us, okay?”

Maggie laughed. Just a little. Barely a few breaths, but it still made Alex’s heart clench with love and longing. She wanted to hear that laugh again; louder, and more of it. She wanted to wrap herself in it in her bunk at night, to breathe it better than air.

Maggie lifted one hand, IVs and all, and mock-saluted. 

“Working on it,” she said. 

Kara nodded. Her hand, pressed against the glass, curled into a fist and she clenched it so hard her arm shook, her knuckles whitening.

Lena, who had quietly sat back through all of this, came up now and slipped her hands onto Kara’s shoulders.

“Darling,” she murmured, “let’s get you cleaned up. Alex needs to help Maggie with her lunch and then run some tests on her.”

Kara’s eyes shot over to Alex. “You’ll know more? From these tests?”

Alex nodded. “We’ll know which way she’s turning, or if she’s staying the same.” 

“I want to wait,” Kara said. “I want to know.”

“It’ll take a few hours before we know anything,” Lena said, her voice and hands soft. “Come. Let’s get you a shower and some fresh clothes, and you need to check in with the Major. Then we can come back.”

Kara gentled under Lena’s touch, her hands loosening and falling to her sides. She turned tired eyes to Alex. “If you know anything before I get back, send an ensign for me, okay? Right away.”

Alex nodded. “Right away.”

“Promise me, Alex, I mean it.” 

Kara had not cried when she’d come out of quarantine. She had not cried when she hugged Alex for the first time in months. But now, talking about Maggie, her eyes glistened with an almost frantic energy.

“I promise,” Alex said.

 

—

 

Alex ran the bloodwork.

Then she ran it again.

She contemplated drawing more blood to run it a third time, but decided it wasn’t worth the resources just to potentially disprove good news.

Maggie’s viral load was down.

It wasn’t zero. It wasn’t completely clean.

But so far, at least, she was getting better.

 

—

 

When Alex went back out to the quarantine hall, Kara was sitting on the floor opposite Maggie’s chamber. She had showered and changed her clothes, and she leaned against the wall with her arms propped on her knees. 

Looking at her like this, from afar, outside of the quarantine chamber—she looked different. It was the weight she’d lost, and the tired slant to her eyes, yes, but there was something more—something Alex struggled to put a finger on. Her physical presence was more imposing, somehow; more solid despite being more slight. Kara had always been lightness personified. She had a kind, bubbly energy that followed her into every room, into every conversation; she could make anybody smile. 

Some of that lightness was gone now. Before, Kara could find the goodness in every person. Now, she seemed harrowed, jagged around the edges, like she’d seen enough of the worst of people to stop believing so easily in the best.

Alex walked closer. “You remind me of Sarah Connor,” she said.

Kara looked over. “Which movie?”

“The second. Compared to the first.” Alex slid down to sit beside Kara, just close enough for their shoulders to touch. “You look like you’ve lived through something.”

Kara glanced down at the floor beneath her knees and smiled, but the smile was full of sadness. “I lived through some things, yeah.” She looked up again, eyes fixed on Maggie, who was still sleeping. “We did, together. Do you have news?”

Alex swallowed. “Yeah. It looks good, Kara. Her viral count is down.”

Kara’s shoulders sagged and her head dropped back to rest against the wall. “So she’s getting better?”

“It’s too soon to say.” Alex watched Kara’s eyes as they tipped up to the ceiling. “But at the very least, she’s not getting worse. And at, what, four or five days after exposure? That’s  _ huge _ .”

Kara set her teeth, but she said nothing.

They sat quietly for a few minutes. Alex listened to the periodic whirring of Maggie’s IV pump, the creaking and clicking of the metal paneling as the floor of the Haven shifted under them. The waves must be up today, Alex thought. Choppy. 

Maggie slept. Alex imagined herself lying beside her, warming her, protecting her until she could protect herself. She imagined Maggie sharing that dream, feeling Alex's presence. 

She thought of the absence she had clung to for so many months, the negative space that was all she had of Maggie. She hoped that Maggie would feel the opposite of that: an awareness of how close Alex was, and of how much closer she would be able to get, if Maggie could find a way to pull through. 

“Where’s Lena?” Alex asked, after awhile.

Kara smiled the reserved, intimate smile that only a mention of Lena could summon. “In the lab, replicating more of your drug prototype.”

Alex glanced at the half-full IV bag. “Oh?”

“That’s the last one,” Kara said, tipping her chin toward the IV stand. “She said you probably wouldn’t even notice you were out.”

The weight of Alex’s exhaustion settled over her. She rubbed at the swollen bags under her eyes. “She was right.”

The quiet grew again. This Kara felt so new and unfamiliar to Alex. She had so few words, and sank into the silences like they embraced her.

Then, without a word, Kara leaned over, settling her head on Alex’s shoulder. Alex, without thinking, rested her head overtop, as though this were a movie night or a long drive in the back seat of a car. Kara’s hair was still slightly damp from her shower and smelled like chemical soap.

“I missed you,” Alex whispered into that hair. “I was so scared I’d never see you again.”

“I was, too,” Kara said. Then she laughed, a raspy chuckle that didn’t quite sound like the Kara of old, but that warmed Alex anyway. “She wasn’t, though,” she said, flicking her fingers toward Maggie. “She was so strong. She always insisted we’d make it. I never heard her even hint at any other possibility.”

Alex could imagine it, the way Kara had described it before: Maggie grasping Kara by the shoulders, bending over her, insisting over and over again that they had to keep going.

The knot that had been tied tight in her gut since Kara and Maggie returned wound itself tighter, and Alex knew it was in nobody’s interest for her to lie by omission any longer.

Alex’s heart pounded, her mouth felt dry. She swallowed down the pressure in her throat. “Listen, Kara. There’s something you need to know. Something that happened while you were gone, between—”

“—you and Lena, I know,” Kara finished.

Alex froze.

Kara smiled and nudged Alex’s elbow with her own. “Don’t look so surprised. Lena told me. But she said I should let you tell me yourself.”

Alex ran a hand over her face, trying to wipe away her confusion. “Listen, it wasn’t—we were just lonely, both of us, and a little drunk, and—“

“It’s okay,” Kara interrupted. She reached across and squeezed Alex’s forearm. “I get it. You didn’t know if you’d ever see us again. It actually makes me happy, in some ways, that you both trusted each other enough for that. And, I mean.” She laughed a little, quietly, almost embarrassed. “I kissed Maggie once.”

That… was unexpected. Alex could only blink for a moment. She wasn’t happy about it, exactly. But nor was she sad, or angry. It was an unlikely awareness, one that settled somewhere under her heart, and would probably take a few days to find a home in her body.

Alex couldn’t bring herself to ask for an explanation, but Kara offered one anyway. “We’d been travelling for so long, and were further from you than we were when we started. We were stranded in Gibraltar.”

“Gibraltar?!” Alex sputtered.

Kara nodded. “There had been an outbreak there, and the city was rioting, and we couldn’t get out. We were just... hiding in this little cave we found down below the Rock of Gibraltar and trying to wait it out. We were living on rainwater, we had no food and nothing to burn for fire for two days, and I just lost it a bit. I was so scared, and so tired, and I just felt so defeated, and I started panicking, which, like, you know me, that’s not something I  _ do _ , Alex.”

Alex nodded. “I know.”

“Maggie wrestled me down to the ground and lay down on me. Right on top of me, to ground me. She kept talking to me, telling me to breathe. And it helped. I worked through it. But I was still sad, and still scared, and I thought for a moment that she might be the only person I had left in the world. So I kissed her. And she stopped me. She was nice about it, but she said for us to kiss meant giving up on getting home to you and Lena, and after all those months of travel she wasn’t going to let us do that.”

Maggie, small and fierce, determined to survive and come home: this was the Maggie who had burrowed so deeply into Alex’s heart.

“Where were you, for all those months?” Alex asked. “Will you tell me what happened? Where you were, besides Gibraltar?”

Kara took a deep breath. Then she sat up straight, nodded, and began.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as aways, to [Kelinswriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter/pseuds/Kelinswriter) for the thorough, and very much needed, beta on this chapter.
> 
> I've created a map to go with this chapter that traces Maggie and Kara's travel route. You can see it on my twitter [here](https://twitter.com/RoadieN60/status/1107118531374735360). I'll link it at the bottom of the page, too.

“We were in Boston when Halifax fell,” Kara began. “We’d dropped off a load of antivirals in Portland when we heard that Boston had a new supply center ready for distribution. So our group split up. Maggie and me, we got ahold of a humvee and drove down, thinking we’d pick up some supplies to bring back. And then Halifax fell. Nobody in, nobody out. So we couldn’t get back to our boat.  

“We looked into a helicopter, but every pilot told us they couldn’t make the distance to St. John’s. We looked for a plane, but apparently St. John’s sucks for planes because of the wind, and since Halifax fell nobody wanted to risk the trip.” Kara rubbed a hand over her face, as though trying to wipe away something dirty. “Maggie tried everything, Alex. She offered pretty much every bribe you can think of.”

Kara let that sit in the air between them for a moment. It was just long enough for Alex’s mind to begin to spiral into a dark mess of guesses about what Maggie might have offered, ugly visions threading through her mind. She was jolted out of it when Kara laughed. 

“This one sleaze-ball pilot made some comment about me,” Kara said. “About me, and, uh, what he’d trade for.”

Every hair on Alex’s body stood on end. She stiffened, and her fists clenched, and she felt her blood pounding in her ears, her rage building—

Kara set a calming hand on her forearm. “Nothing happened. But you know, it had been two months with no progress, and I was desperate enough that I might have done it. If I’d known that the alternative would be six or seven more months of travelling, I might have done it to get us home. But before I could even say anything, Maggie punched him  _ so hard _ , Alex, it was incredible. She got a bit of his blood on her hand and we spent two days super stressed out about it, in case he was infected, but it was worth it, God it was worth it to see the look on his face after she just freaking—“

Kara mimed it, punching the air in front of her, and grinned. Alex smiled too, imagining it, some asshole underestimating Maggie for being small and thin and finding out the hard way—the  _ very _ hard way—that everything about her was strong.

“That’s when she started carrying the tourniquet,” Kara said, her voice turning somber. “Just in case.”

Alex’s smile fell.

Kara told of how, after those months of listening for news on a route home, they heard that St. John’s was developing a supply route through Iceland. They thought about it for a few days, she said, and then agreed that trying for something had to be better than waiting for nothing. So they decided to try to make a long trip around: south to Jacksonville, Florida. Hop a supply run to Argo Haven in the middle of the central Atlantic. Then to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and to Morocco. Up across the Strait of Gibraltar into Europe, and from there to England, then  Iceland, then St. John’s, and finally,  _ finally _ , home again to Deo Haven. 

Alex tried to follow the route of their plan in her head. She couldn’t remember whether Jacksonville was on the Gulf or Atlantic side of Florida, and honestly, wasn’t sure whether she could place Tenerife on a map. And navigating to an unfamiliar haven would be as terrifying as it was difficult: the havens weren’t very big. It would be like looking for a pebble on the beach. Her palms felt clammy at the thought of being in the open ocean, alone in a small boat, surrounded by so much water. 

And yet, somehow, they’d done it, or so it seemed.

“Jesus, Kara.” she said. “That’s nuts.” 

“I know.” Kara combed her fingers through her hair, pushing it back from her face, but it fell back into place, hiding her eyes. She stared forward, looking not at Maggie but past her; past the wall, past everything, into the distance.“But after so long of no progress, we had two choices: sit tight and hope something would eventually happen to solve the problem, or make the decision to try to solve it ourselves. That’s what we chose.”

Alex couldn’t help but smile at that. Because both Maggie and Kara were like that: they hated to hold still when they could run; they hated to wait when they could be moving. 

They hadn’t thought it would take so long, Kara explained. A month, maybe two. They hadn’t anticipated the degree of global collapse. They hadn’t anticipated the degree of fear, and rioting, and violence. They drove their humvee until they had to abandon it. Then they hitchhiked. They hot-wired abandoned vehicles to drive out the fuel left in the tank. From time to time they found cars retrofitted with rusting solar panels and drove them for a day or two until the circuitry crapped out. They had a tent, until an encounter with raiders left it trashed. 

Kara had always been so good, when they were kids. She’d been the kind of person who waited for the walk signal to cross the street even if there were no cars coming, who cleaned her room every time their parents asked, who helped to load the dishwasher without asking. She seemed to have been born with an excess of empathy and patience and gentleness.

Imagining Kara hot-wiring cars and confronting riots was imagining a kitten thrust into a dog fighting ring.

Sometimes, Kara said, they would break into abandoned houses.

“I always went in first,” Kara said, “to check for anything contaminated. Maggie was doing so much to keep me safe. She was charting our route, she was negotiating with all of our rides, she was getting us through the riots. It felt like one of the only things I could do to protect her.” 

Alex’s chest felt tight as they looked, together, at Maggie. Maggie, lying still in her little cell, a dormant hurricane in a bell jar.

“She hated it,” Kara said.

“She’s never liked it when people put themselves on the line for her,” Alex said. “She never thought she was worth the risk.”

Kara nodded. She knew.

Alex could have gone on: about how she and Maggie had been working on that, about how she had been slowly coaxing Maggie to realize that she was worth something, that she was meaningful, that her big heart and beautiful soul mattered in the world. But Alex thought of the tally in her wall: she wasn’t allowed to cry yet. She couldn’t cry until she knew how this ordeal would resolve, because once she started crying, she knew she wouldn’t stop. And if she started talking about how hard she and Maggie had been working on Maggie’s sense of self-worth, on encouraging her to see in herself some fraction of what Alex saw in her, Alex knew she would start crying and not stop.

So she changed the subject. “What did you eat?”

Kara laughed, like it was a ridiculous question. “We had dried rations for awhile. And we’d try to get to supply stations along the way to get more, but that didn’t happen often. We did a lot of scavenging. Did you know that Maggie is, like, an encyclopedia of information on edible wild greens?”

Alex smiled. It was the kind of thing they had talked about back on the old military base, the first one, in Alex’s bed together. They would fantasize about fleeing into the woods, living off the land where nobody would find them; a tiny pocket world without COdA. “She told me she’d learned about it as a teenager. She was obsessed with survival stuff.”

“Yeah, after everything with her parents, it makes sense she’d be interested in survival skills,” Kara said, and Alex froze. 

Of course Maggie had told Kara that story over their eight months alone together. Of course she had, when the two of them had been alone together at the end of the world. 

(After COdA, Alex had asked Maggie if she wanted to find out what happened to her parents, and if they’d survived.

“Why should I?” Maggie said, sounding tired. “They never cared what happened to me.”)

“Sometimes, in the empty houses, we’d get lucky and find canned food.” Kara sat up and turned, grinning at Alex with wide eyes, and Alex’s heart warmed at this sudden reappearance of the Kara from before.

She realized, very suddenly, that this event would be a benchmark in her life, like when her family adopted Kara or when she met Maggie. Her life would be divided into the Before, and the After, of Maggie and Kara’s long disappearance.

Kara was still chattering. “This one place we found, Alex, I think it was outside Atlanta, it had spicy cup ramen! You know the kind you can usually only get in Asian grocery stores? Oh, that was a good day! There were four cups, and we knew we should each eat one and save one, but we couldn’t help it, we ate all of them, and we both felt so sick after but it was  _ so  _ worth it. And I remember that house had actual mattresses that weren’t rotten so we got to sleep on a real bed. It was dusty, so we knew nobody had slept on it in awhile, so we didn’t have to worry about whether it might be contaminated.”

Alex could imagine it: Kara and Maggie sitting on the floor of some abandoned kitchen, laughing together, eating spicy cup-o-noodles with their fingers. Kara and Maggie had become close since they’d come to Deo Haven and started Running together, but that closeness was filtered through their shared love for Alex. They’d always seemed like strong allies, Alex thought, rather than friends, though Alex hoped that they’d become friends over time. Despite the circumstances, the thought of them together like that, carrying each other through impossible hardship and then laughing together over a simple pleasure, filled Alex with a happiness she could never have imagined or foreseen.

Above Alex and Maggie’s head, now, Maggie’s IV pump whirred and clicked every few seconds. The rhythm seemed to contain the time, the moments of future becoming moments of present where, at least for now, all three of them had each other.

Kara continued her story. She and Maggie made it to Jacksonville, and then connected with a supply run to Argo Haven. Argo, Kara said, was only a haven by title. It was brutally militarized, kept in line by threat of force. She and Maggie were stranded there for weeks because the Major refused to make any runs to the Canary Islands. A runner snuck them onto his boat for a trip to Dakar, which was as close as they could get. 

In Dakar, they spent days, maybe weeks, trying to barter for a vehicle, and when they got one it was a tiny thing, so old Maggie had been surprised it could handle the solar panel retrofit. It broke down after a few days, and they started walking. They’d find abandoned vehicles in deserted villages and hotwire them, but most of them were so clogged with desert sand that they wouldn’t last more than a day. The dangers were the same as they’d been in the States: disease, raiders, roadblocks making the trip harder. But they were in such a different place, and they didn’t speak the language, and that made everything much more frightening. 

“We’d never sleep at the same time,” Kara said. “We slept in shifts. And if one of us heard something, or saw something—anything at all—we’d wake the other and go do recon together.”

That strange word Kara had said to Maggie that morning— _ recon _ —made so much more sense, now. So did Maggie’s lightning-quick reaction to it.

They were tired all the time, Kara said. And sunburned, and windburned, with sand in their clothes and their hair. But they met good people along the way, too. Kind people.

“This one guy, he was hauling livestock to Tangier and he let us ride the whole way in the back of his pickup truck. We rode with him for three days. And when we left him, we tried to pay him in trade, but all he asked was that we pray for him and his family. For them to survive.”

Alex laughed, both sad and bemused. “Can you imagine? Putting your faith in religion in the middle of all this?” She gestured vaguely, encompassing all of it: the quarantine chambers, the haven, the world, the plague.

But Kara didn’t laugh. “I prayed for his family,” she said, dead serious. “I still do. Every day, to this day. On the road, I made Maggie do it with me. It doesn’t matter what I believe. It’s not about me, it’s about him. His kindness probably saved us weeks and weeks of travelling. And  _ he _ believed.”

The echoes of Alex’s laughter seemed to turn and laugh back on her. She dropped her chin, chastened.

“It was nice, actually,” Kara said. “It ended up being sort of calming. A way to center my thoughts every day as we kept travelling.” 

They travelled on, across the Strait of Gibraltar in a ferry’s cargo hold only hours before Gibraltar broke into its latest bout of civil unrest. They hid in a cave in the Rock of Gibraltar with nothing to eat for two days. That was where Kara kissed Maggie, and Maggie, kindly and gently, declined the advance. They snuck out during a rainstorm and crossed the unmanned border into Spain. There, they found cheese aging in cellars and citrus abandoned in orchards and, once, grapes that had dried into raisins on the vine. But in Spain they were met with greater suspicion than they had experienced in Africa. They were dirty, and tired, and didn’t look healthy, so nobody wanted to help them.. Cars were hard to find, too. Kara and Maggie walked day after day, sleeping in storage sheds or half-rotten barns. 

It was Maggie who suggested that maybe, instead of walking toward France, they could go toward Portugal to see if they could find a supply route to take them north by sea.

It was a good plan. Lisbon was buzzing, a sort of unlikely, accidental metropolis by virtue of its location the same way Halifax had been. They learned of a haven called Dax in the Azores that ran a supply route to Plymouth.

“They were so desperate for runners at the Lisbon supply station that when we showed up they basically handed us a boat and some coordinates and a load of raw research materials and told us to just head out to Dax. So we went. And—and then...”

Kara inhaled, and her breath shook. Her eyes were fixed on Maggie, and Alex could see that they were watering. 

“Hey,” Alex said, “It’s okay. You don’t have to finish.”

But Kara shook her head. “You deserve to know.” 

So Alex reached over, and tangled her fingers with Kara’s, and waited.

“We should have known, when we got to Dax Haven. Nobody met us, and somebody always meets the supply boat. But we guessed they just didn’t know we were coming. We didn’t—we never even imagined that it could be —that it might be the...” Kara clutched at Alex’s fingers and looked over. “It’s my fault, Alex. It’s all my fault.”

“Shh,” Alex murmured. She reached up and pushed Kara’s hair back, tucking it behind her ear. “I don’t believe that.”

“When we got there, Maggie went to find someone while I tied the boat up. And then—and then I don’t know, exactly. She opened the door, and I heard this… horrible sound. Human, but not. And then Maggie came hobbling back, with the tourniquet around her leg, and told me very calmly to untie the boat. So I did, and I hauled her back in, and we pushed away.

“She pulled the tourniquet tighter and asked me to open up the supply boxes and pull out the cold packs. She said she needed to keep her heart rate down. So I did. I was terrified, Alex, I didn’t know what was going on. She started packing her leg with cold packs, right on the skin. I told her she was going to burn herself it but she said that was the point. Because the whole haven was infected, and she’d opened a door and there had been a woman lying there in the final throes of the disease, bleeding everywhere.

“She wasn’t thinking. She didn’t know what she was doing. But she was dying and scared, and she reached for Maggie’s leg, and scratched her ankle by accident. So Maggie was infected too.”

Something in Alex’s chest released, a clenching she hadn’t noticed. 

She hadn’t realized how badly she had wanted to know how it happened.

“If I had just gone first,” Kara said. She was crying now. “If I had gone, and she had tied the boat, she’d still be healthy.” Her breath shuddered, her words forcing themselves out between the growing sobs. “She’d be out here with you, and with me. We have so many in-jokes now, Alex. We have our own stories. We’d make you so jealous. And you’d love it.”

And God, Kara was right: Alex would love that. 

“It is not your fault,” Alex said. “This plague is not your fault.”

“But I’m  _ immune,”  _ Kara said, and it sounded, somehow, like both a question and its answer. Alex understood, very suddenly and viscerally, that Kara saw herself as the eye of a hurricane, the calm beating heart so fully surrounded by destruction that she couldn’t help but see herself as tangled up in the damage.

Alex leaned closer and laid a hand on the back of Kara’s neck. “That’s not your fault, either.”

They sat quietly for a moment. Alex wrapped her arms around Kara, and Kara dropped her head to Alex’s chest, like she had done when they were children and Kara had mourned her parents.

“I’m so scared, Alex,” Kara said quietly. “I’m so sick of being scared.”

Alex pressed a kiss to her hair. “You’re safe, Kara. With me, with Lena. On this haven, you’re safe.”

But Kara sat up and shook her head, her eyes glistening. “Not like that,” she said. Her voice was wet and hoarse, and her eyes were soft and distant, reminding Alex of the frightened girl she’d been when she’d come to live with Alex’s family.

“I’m terrified that everyone’s going to die except me,” Kara said. “That I’ll be the only one left alive.”

Oh.

Alex had never thought of it that way.

She squeezed Kara’s hand as hard as she could. “I’m not dying today,” she said. “I’m not planning to die for awhile.”

Kara settled down against Alex’s shoulder again, and Alex wrapped an arm around her and held her tight. Kara was bony and angular, and Alex thought she might bruise where Kara’s sharp shoulder dug into her collarbone.

But she didn’t care.

 

—

 

Lena forced Alex to go take a shower and eat a proper dinner in the mess hall while she and Kara sat with Maggie. When Alex came back, they were sitting on the floor where Kara and Alex had been sitting before. Kara was asleep on Lena’s shoulder.

“Take her to bed,” Alex whispered. “Have a good night’s sleep together. You both deserve it.”

Lena smiled, but just a little, as though she were ashamed of this moment of quiet happiness in front of Alex, whose happiness clung to life on the other side of the glass. Her soft words and soft fingers tried to wake Kara gently, but Kara jumped a little anyway, her hands flailing out in front of her. She found herself again a second later, blinking in the harsh halogen light, and then smiled at Lena.

Alex laid out her pillow and blanket next to Maggie’s chamber for the third night in a row. She hugged Lena and a groggy Kara and then watched them walk away, Lena’s arm around Kara’s waist, Kara leaning on Lena like she trusted her not to let her fall.

 

—

 

The next day, Maggie was more alert. Alex suited up and went to sit with her in the chamber. She helped Maggie work through some exercises with her good leg, and with her arms; then she helped her sit up, propped against her pillows.

Maggie looked at Alex with a clarity in her eyes that Alex hadn’t seen in more than six months.

“God, I feel so gross,” Maggie said. “Like there’s a layer of grime all over me.”

Lena and Alex had bathed Maggie as best they could after her surgery, but that had been three days ago. So Alex asked Lena to send a basin and clean cloth through the hatch and then leave them alone for thirty minutes. Slowly, carefully, she helped Maggie to move from the bed to the room’s lone plastic chair. Then she helped her out of the scrubs she was wearing. And then Alex filled the basin with warm water from the faucet, set it on the ledge, and tipped Maggie’s head back into it.

“I can do it,” Maggie said, reaching up, and that little bit of resistance filled Alex with a hope she hadn’t dared to let herself feel.

“Not with those IVs, you can’t,” Alex replied.

And Maggie couldn’t fight that.

They had liked to take baths together during their few years of calm. It had been one of Alex’s favourite forms of intimacy: she’d run the soap over Maggie’s skin while Maggie lay lax against her, body loose, her ribs expanding into Alex’s with every breath. It wasn’t a sexual feeling, precisely. For one thing, sex in the bathtub didn’t work very well. But there was a feeling of deep sensuality, of vulnerability and trust, that Maggie gave her in those moments, where she’d let Alex do something she usually did for herself. 

This was like that, and not like that. Maggie sat back and let Alex touch her; first her hair, and then, with a damp cloth, everywhere else. Maggie kept her eyes open, seeking Alex’s eyes through the mask, and Alex caught her gaze between passes of the cloth over her skin. Her body was so very, very thin, her ribs showing in her chest, her scapulae prominent. But it was still Maggie’s body, vulnerable and trusting, laid bare to Alex’s hands.

Dressed, again, Maggie asked to stay in the chair for a bit, just for the change of scenery. When Lena came back, Alex asked her for clean sheets and remade the bed with tight, military precision.

“No bedsores,” she said. 

Maggie smiled. “I’m sore enough without them,” she joked, her voice rough.

Her vitality was both thrilling and terrifying. Bodies sometimes found a reserve of energy for a final push before they died, Alex knew. This could as easily be that as it could be a sign that Maggie was recovering, viral numbers be damned. The very fact that she was infected made the former more likely than the latter.

Alex took another blood sample to test.

Maggie’s viral count was marginally lower than it had been the day before. 

Marginally. Fractionally. The difference was so small, it could be written off as a simple sample fluctuation. 

But still: it meant that, so far, at least, Maggie was surviving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See a map of Maggie and Kara's travel route [here](https://twitter.com/RoadieN60/status/1107118531374735360), shared via Twitter.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait on this, guys! I detoured a couple weeks ago to binge-write [a long, fluffy one-shot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18177947) and that ate up all my writing time for a minute, and then I struggled to get back into the writing headspace for this angst-bomb. But I think I found it again, thanks in no small part to some cheerleading-slash-tough-love from [Kelinswriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter/pseuds/Kelinswriter), who continues to be the best beta ever.
> 
> This chapter has a significant **content warning** at the bottom of the page.

Days passed, and Maggie’s better energy continued to improve. She slept less and talked more. She could sit up by herself, and she could work through a few of her leg exercises without Alex there to support her. Alex began to wean her off the post-surgical pain medications. Maggie was awake most of the day, now, and asked Alex if she could have a book to read or a deck of playing cards to pass the time.

Three days after that second blood test, Alex hovered near Maggie’s chamber while Maggie sat up and played Solitaire on her bed. She watched as Maggie cycled through her deck without playing any cards, and then cycled through again.

“You can play the four of spades on that five of diamonds,” Alex said.

Maggie paused for a moment, and then nodded, and played the card. Then she cycled through the deck again, but the move hadn’t been enough to save the game. She cycled through one more time, that last-ditch effort everyone always makes at the end of a hand of solitaire, as though some playable element would materialize magically. But, of course, it didn’t. Alex leaned against the glass and watched as Maggie sighed, gathered up the cards and began to shuffle them.

Alex waited as Maggie dealt herself a new game and made her starting moves. Then she picked up her deck and began to deal from her hand.

The steel floor was tiring to stand on, unforgiving underfoot, but standing was the only way Alex could see Maggie’s cards, which made her feel like they were more together, somehow, than when Maggie played alone and Alex simply sat on the other side of the glass. So Alex shifted a little from foot to foot and waited to see if Maggie got stuck.

The floor creaked under Alex’s feet, and Maggie’s necks stiffened, as though her hackles were coming up.

“Alex?” she said, and for all the tension in her shoulders, she didn’t seem annoyed.

Alex straightened. “Yeah?”

“Do you think...” Maggie swallowed. She looked nervous, Alex thought. Why would she look nervous? Alex’s palms began to itch, and her mind raced to the storage cabinet in the lab where the hazmat kits lived, wondering if she could justify contaminating another one today.

But what Maggie said didn’t justify the use of any hazmat kits. “Could I maybe… get an hour to myself? I’d just… like a bit of time alone. If that’s okay.”

Alex’s pulse quickened, her lungs expanded. Patients on the verge of death were often scared, and scared patients rarely wanted to be alone.

“It’s nothing bad,” Maggie rushed on. “I just want a little break from being observed all the time.”

There were few better signs that a patient was feeling well than for them to ask to be alone.

“Of course, Maggie,” Alex said. She laid her palm flat on the glass, as close as she could get to laying it on Maggie’s cheek. 

Maggie smiled, her shoulders loosening in relief. The urge to touch her surged up in Alex, as it so often did. Alex had become used to that desire, that longing, as it supplanted the more distant longing she had lived with for so many months. She let herself hold Maggie’s eyes for a long moment, and then patted the glass once before walking down the hall toward the lab. She had a sample of Maggie’s blood that needed testing, anyway. 

She ran the tests with an eye on the quarantine hall video feed, but still.

This time, the tests showed a significant drop in Maggie’s viral load. Alex couldn’t help it: she dared to let herself feel hope.

As Alex continued to reduce Maggie’s pain meds, Maggie began to complain that her missing leg itched, or ached, or tingled, though insisted it was a manageable discomfort, all things considered. She made food requests from the kitchen, and Kara took it upon herself to deliver them, often bringing back some of the same for herself and Alex. They would all eat together from opposite sides of the glass.

“You made it back to your girl,” Maggie said to Kara one morning. “How does it feel?”

Kara smiled, and smiled, and her happiness sparked something warm and hopeful in Alex’s heart.

Lena worked double-time in the labs, those days, trying to compensate for Alex’s absence, as Alex spent most available time sitting with Maggie.. 

“I’m not helping Maggie by sitting out there with her,” Alex said to Lena, one afternoon. “I should start working again.”

But Lena had put a hand on Alex’s shoulder as if to block her from moving in that direction. “Treasure every single moment of your time with her. I can handle the lab.” 

Four days after Alex helped Maggie to bathe, Maggie’s viral load hit zero for the first time.

Alex ran the test twice. Then she went and took more of Maggie’s blood and asked Lena to run it twice more, just in case her desire for a particular outcome was skewing her read of the results.

Lena, her eyes glistening, came to Alex a few hours later and told her: both her tests had come back at zero, too. Alex, overcome, had picked Lena up and swung her around in triumph, and then she’d run to Kara, who was also in the room, and hugged her fiercely in victory.

They didn’t say anything to Maggie. They didn’t want to give her false hope, or, worse, make her start pushing her body past what it could handle, jeopardizing her recovery.

Her viral load held at zero for three days. Over the next few days, Alex discontinued the IV pain medication, and then the antibiotics, and then the antivirals, so that by the end of the week, Maggie held strong on only Alex and Lena’s prototype drug with Tylenol for pain. 

With each new change to the medication, Alex’s nerves flared. It felt like her whole self had grown attuned to Maggie’s, as though every shift of Maggie’s muscles or twitch of her skin lived in Alex’s own body. As Maggie grew more alert, and seemed more healthy, Alex grew more tense and twitchy. Her nerves and her excitement interrupted her sleep and wired her during her waking hours.

Midway through the second week, between Maggie’s growing strength Alex was underslept and jittery and exhausted, but Maggie had begun to truly seem like herself again, and her viral load was still zero. 

Lena literally whooped in excitement when she found out, throwing both hands into the air in a Kara-like gesture that made Alex smile. Kara wrapped her arms tightly around herself and looked like she was fighting the urge to grin, as though acknowledging her happiness might make it go away. But her eyes — the way they shone and sparkled and twitched at the corners — gave everything away.

They decided to tell Maggie together.

Kara went to the kitchen and came back with a peanut-butter brownie. Lena brought a little storm candle. The three of them walked into the quarantine hall together, making a procession of it and stopping by Maggie’s chamber. Carefully and without explanation, Alex pushed a plate holding the brownie, lit candle on top, through the food hatch. 

Maggie sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes, squinting at the light from the candle. 

“Is it my birthday already? I don’t even know what month it is.”

“No, it’s only February,” Alex said, “but this might be a new day to start celebrating. Go on! Blow it out.”

Maggie pulled the plate along the ledge, toward herself. “Can you at least tell me what this is about? To help me know what to wish for.”

Alex inhaled and gripped her hands together in front of her, white-knuckled. She felt Kara’s hand steady on her shoulder. 

“You’ve been virus-free for twelve days,” she said.

Maggie froze. 

Alex wasn’t sure what she expected. Happiness, surely. A smile, a grin, maybe even a yell of joy. 

But that wasn’t what happened. Maggie sat still, her face expressionless. Then she rubbed her eyes. “Oh,” she said.

Alex’s heart clenched. She couldn’t possibly know what Maggie was thinking, she reasoned. She couldn’t possibly understand what Maggie had lived through, to shape how she felt right now. 

She forced a smile. “Will you blow out your candle? Have your brownie?”

Maggie smiled, but the smile was joyless, stopping below her eyes. She blew out the candle, and then took a few bites of the brownie before setting it aside.

“It’s really good,” she said. “I’m just not that hungry right now. I’ll have it later, I promise.”

Alex felt her body wilting. She’d been fired up all morning, powered by the giddiness of telling Maggie about her progress, but that energy seeped out of her now like helium escaping from a balloon. She tried so, so hard to press down the disappointment in her chest. What was happening?

She froze up. There were things to discuss, she knew that, but Maggie’s half-hearted response seemed to have knocked them all out of Alex’s head.

Lena squeezed Alex’s elbow and then slipped past her to stand closer to the microphone. “If it’s all right, Maggie, I’d like to talk you through next steps,” she said.

Maggie looked at her own hands, which picked at the threads of her blanket. She swallowed, then said, quietly, “Okay.”

Lena explained that they would taper her slowly off the new drug over the course of at least ten days. Then, she would need to remain virus-free for at least seventy-two hours without medication before she could be let out of quarantine.

Maggie listened to all of it, nodding at all the appropriate places and confirming at all the appropriate times, but her expression remained as neutral as a mask.

“Do you have any questions?” Lena asked.

Maggie sat quietly for a few moments. Alex could see her thinking, could imagine her weighing odds and options and potential futures, just as Alex herself had been doing ever since Maggie came home. Eventually, Maggie looked up at Lena, her eyes only flicking once to Alex’s. “What happens if I start showing symptoms, or my viral load starts to come back up?”

“Then we get you back on higher doses, and we regroup to determine the next course of action,” Lena said.

Maggie nodded once, her lips tight. “Okay.”

Maggie was quiet for the rest of the afternoon. She ate more of her brownie, but didn’t finish it, though she also didn’t send it back through the hatch to be taken away. Alex was glad for that. Such waste would have been hard to justify to the cook, whom she’d had to sweet-talk into making such a luxurious treat in the first place.

That night, Alex was back in quarantine hall, leaning against the wall with her blanket tucked around her knees. Maggie worked her leg through some of the PT Alex had given her, but even from afar Alex could tell that her eyes were unfocused. The exercises were long and repetitive and could be meditative, but that wasn’t the look on Maggie’s face, now. Her eyes were open but her gaze turned inward, at her own past or another plane or something equally inaccessible to Alex these days. 

Alex dared to interrupt. “Maggie?” 

There must have been something in her tone, because Maggie let her leg drop back to the mattress with a huff of air from her lungs. “Yeah?”

“This is good, right? That you might actually recover. It’s a good thing.”

It was the first time she’d said those words aloud:  _ you might actually recover _ . She hugged herself. That absence, the lack-of-Maggie she had lived with for so long, it no longer kept her company. It was replaced by the potential  _ for  _ Maggie, the anticipation of something better, warmer, truer than that persistent negative space. 

“Oh, babe.” Maggie’s voice turned soft. Her gaze had turned inward through the evening, contemplating something Alex couldn’t see or feel, and Alex felt a gnawing, growing disconnection. But now Maggie turned soft eyes to Alex’s, meeting her gaze through the glass, and Alex latched onto the link like a lifeline.

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Of course it’s a good thing. It’s amazing to think that maybe I’ll be able to hold you again is just…” 

But then, so soon after that soft connection had been forged, Maggie hardened again, clenching her hand into a tight fist in the blankets near her hip.“But Alex?”

Alex breathed for a few moments, the pressure of the moment making the air shudder its way and out of her lungs. “Yeah?”

“I just… I don’t want to be kept alive forever on these drugs just to stay in this quarantine box.” She swallowed. “This… isn’t a life. So like, consider this my DNR request, okay?”

Alex’s heart raced. This felt like a conversation to have had a week ago, when Maggie’s blood still had a detectable virus load and there was less reason to feel optimistic about things.

But this was not the kind of request a person could ignore. Alex couldn’t find words, but she nodded.

Maggie smiled, her shoulders relaxing. “Thank you.”

Alex couldn’t find her voice to respond.

 

—

 

As the days passed, Alex weaned Maggie off the IV drugs until all that was going into her vein was saline. Eventually, Alex was able to remove the drain from Maggie’s healing stump. The bruising faded from black to yellow and, slowly, from the edges inward, developed the colour of healthy skin. Alex changed the dressing over the sutures to one that was lighter and more breathable.

Maggie’s mood was unpredictable. On rare days, she’d sit up propped against the wall by her bed and play solitaire with her deck of cards, or chat happily with Alex, reminiscing about easier times (though neither she nor Alex dared turn the conversations toward the future, as though this quiet promise, this amorphous potential, might disappear if they looked at it directly). But more often, she’d be silent and contemplative. Sometimes she was driven by some emotion that Alex couldn’t quite recognize—it looked like rage, sort of, but without the anger; or mania without the euphoria—and it drove Maggie to do crunches and leg-lifts on her bed until she collapsed or until someone convinced her to stop.

On day eight, Alex returned after a shower to find Kara by Maggie’s chamber, standing close to the glass and speaking quietly into the microphone.

Alex hung back to let them finish talking. It only took a moment: Kara noticed her and smiled, and then turned back to the microphone for her final words. As Alex approached, Kara began to walk toward her, and they met halfway and paused. Kara squeezed Alex’s elbow.

“She knows she’s being difficult,” Kara said quietly.

Alex shook her head and gestured vaguely, waving it off.

“No, really, she knows,” Kara repeated. “And she’s scared she’s going to drive you away, or upset you, or something.”

“What? I would never—she couldn’t!”

“I know that,” Kara said, “and I think, deep down, she knows that, too. I think it’s just… she’s surprised to still be alive. She’s not sure what it means.”

Alex took a deep breath and set her jaw. The corridor smelled like steel and saltwater and for the first time, Alex felt aware of its its corrosion, of the storms and ocean waves taking their toll. 

Kara was interpreting Maggie’s moods, and her behaviour, and Alex realized very suddenly that right now, at this moment, Kara knew Maggie better than Alex did. Kara had knowledge of Maggie that Alex would never be able to share.

Kara’s thumb twitched against the soft skin inside Alex’s elbow, and Alex wanted to recoil from that touch. It felt patronizing and misguided and like some kind of power move; Kara’s familiarity with Maggie thrust at her like the point of a spear she wanted to parry.

Alex’s hands had clenched into fists; she forced them to relax. “I’ll talk to her.”

Kara shook her head. “Wait until she’s out,” she said, as though that were a foregone conclusion. “She’ll be more comfortable talking when she’s not behind glass anymore.”

“She seems comfortable enough talking to you,” Alex snapped, and immediately regretted it.  

But if Kara was upset, she didn’t show it. “I was the only person she talked to for eight months. I feel like a toddler learning words again, sometimes, when I talk to anyone other than her, and I’ve been out of quarantine for weeks, now. And you… Alex, the stakes are so high, for her, with you. She feels like she has so much to lose.”

The stakes  _ were  _ high. Alex felt the height of them every day, every moment, every medical decision, every time Maggie looked aloof, and every time she smiled. She felt them when she lay down to sleep on the cold, stainless steel floor and felt warmer than she did in her own room, in her own bed, because Maggie was there, just a few feet away. 

And yet right now, in this moment, the idea of sitting with Maggie again made Alex flare with some unknowable emotion. It wasn’t anger, precisely, nor dread, but it filled her with the promise of panic, like that instant on a surfboard between realizing she was about to wipe out and actually beginning to fall. That instant where her balance was already lost but her brain flailed frantically for the means to right her back up again.

Kara’s hand dropped from Alex’s elbow. “I’ll let you get back to her,” she said.

But Alex shook her head. “No, um. Would you stay? I just remembered I need to—” She jerked her thumb back behind her, over her shoulder. 

Kara nodded in understanding. “Sure, Alex, I’ll stay.”

Alex had already started retreating toward the door.

 

—

 

Of course, Alex had not actually forgotten anything she needed to do. She closed the door to the quarantine hall and leaned against it for a moment, listening to Kara’s footsteps on the other side as they walked back to Maggie’s chamber and stopped there. 

For lack of any other plans, she crossed the corridor and entered the lab.

Lena was in there, of course, working not at the lab bench but at a counter off to the side, with a screwdriver and a tube of adhesive and a stack of parts.

“What are you working on?”

Lena startled and then turned to face Alex, her hand gripping at her chest. “My goodness, you scared me,” she said, and then waved Alex closer. “I’m trying to enhance our ability to replicate the new treatment so that we can distribute it on supply runs.”

Alex stood by Lena’s shoulder and watched as she wired a burette to a sensor and then set it alongside four others she’d already finished. “We don’t know if it works yet,” Alex said. “Even if she recovers, it could just be that she was resilient.”

Lena turned and cocked an eyebrow at her. “And how will we ever know if that’s the case unless we send it to places where people are infected?”

Alex nodded.  _ Touché _ . 

For the next few minutes, Alex stood in silence and continued to watch Lena as she measured lengths of tubing and affixed them to the ends of the burettes. Then she picked up a prefabricated sensor unit, unscrewed the back, and pried it open to squint at its motherboard.

“I’ll need to track down a soldering iron to do anything further, she muttered.

“I’m sure they have one down in Engineering,” Alex said. “Want me to go check?”

Lena paused for a moment, thinking, and then set the pieces down on the counter. She turned to face Alex, one hip propped against the counter and both arms crossed over her chest. “Okay. Spill. What’s going on?”

“What?” Alex rolled her shoulders and then crossed her arms, mirroring Lena. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”

“We couldn’t pry you away from that hallway for weeks, and now you’re looking for excuses to be elsewhere.” Lena’s lips tightened in concern.

Alex met her gaze for a moment. Her gut response was to be defensive, but that tense anger quickly gave way beneath an unexpected sense of relief. Lena’s eyes were firm, but not unkind.

Somewhere above them, a furnace groaned into gear. Metal walls and ducts creaked to make space for the heat.

“How are things going for you?” Alex asked.

Lena shook her head. “We’re not talking about me.”

“No, it’s—I’m asking for a reason. About you and Kara. Now that you’ve had time together again.” She tightened her arms around herself. “I’m just wondering… how that is. For you.”

Lena tensed and she eyed Alex with something like suspicion. But then, just like Alex had softened under Lena’s eyes, Lena seemed to go slack under under Alex’s. Without a word, Lena unsnapped the cuff of her lab coat and rolled it up above her elbow. Then she pushed up the worn cotton sleeve of her shirt, until—

Alex’s breath stopped.

_ No _ , she thought. She could swear something important inside her must be physically breaking, her lungs collapsing, even as her heart jerked and pounded in her chest.  _ Not Kara. Not sweet, kind, golden-hearted Kara. Not— _

Lena’s forearm was badly bruised, just below her elbow, like a cuff around her forearm. 

Like someone had grabbed her.

The edge of another bruise slipped out from below the edge of her bunched-up cuff.

“It’s not quite what you’re thinking,” Lena said. “She does it when she’s asleep, or when she wakes up from a nightmare. She registers the nearest person as a threat before she’s conscious enough to do otherwise, and that person is always me.”

“PTSD or something?” Alex asked.

Lena nodded. “I think so. As soon as she wakes fully, she stops. And then she’s horrified, and feels so ashamed she shuts me out. She’ll go hours without even looking at me.”  

Alex inhaled a deep breath, but it felt like her lungs were filling with water. “I can’t—I can’t imagine—it’s  _ Kara _ ,” she said, as if that itself should make her meaning obvious.

“I know,” Lena said. “She’s been working hard to hide it from you. She said you’d lose respect for her.” She touched the bruise gently with her opposite hand, and Alex could imagine Kara touching it the same way, as though her hands could heal the harm they’d caused. 

Alex’s breaths came quicker. Of course she wouldn’t lose respect for Kara over her trauma, over an  _ illness _ .  _ Of course _ she wouldn’t. 

But that bruise was awful. She couldn’t stand by and let that happen, either.

The furnace shut itself down again, its whirring noise fading and leaving them in silence.

“She’s horrified with herself,” Lena repeated quietly. Her eyes grew wet, shining under the halogen lights, and she tugged her sleeves back down again, the bruises retreating like a shameful secret. “She told me she wants to move into her own cabin until she figures out how to control herself. But it won’t be that simple, will it? Are there even any empty cabins on Deo Haven? I’ve taken to sitting awake until she falls asleep, because she told me she struggles to sleep without someone watching for danger. It’s pretty much the only thing I can do to help. It’s not like we have psychologists here, or access to antidepressant or antipsychotic medications—”

Lena’s voice rose higher and higher in pitch, speeding up and becoming more pressured, until Alex stepped forward and wrapped her arms tightly around Lena’s shoulders. She willed her feet down into the ground, through the ocean and into the earth deep below, as though it could be ballast for both of them, and stood as still and firm as she could until she felt the tension in Lena’s body give way.

“I don’t know what to do,”  Lena said finally. “I love her so much, and I don’t know what to do.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Alex murmured, even though she had no idea, none whatsoever, what they could possibly come up with.

Alex felt when Lena was ready to be released. She stepped back and turned away, letting Lena have a moment to compose herself, and went to turn on the monitor that tracked the quarantine corridor. She clicked through the camera views until she found the one that focused on Maggie’s chamber. 

Maggie was sitting up, leaning forward onto hands that curled over the edge of the mattress, her words soundless over the video feed. In the reflection on the glass door, Alex could see Kara sitting on the floor, her arms resting on her bent knees, her hands curled into tense, gnarled shapes like animal claws. Kara stared at her own hands like they were something foreign, like they were insects to be crushed, and her eyes looked wide and ragged and wet. She nodded almost aggressively at something Maggie was saying to her. 

Alex turned off the monitor to let them have their privacy. When she looked over at Lena, she found her working with some large vats, running pipes from them to the burettes.

Engineering would have a soldering iron. She’d go down to borrow it, and bring it back for Lena. She’d do that, and then she’d decide what to do next.

 

—

 

When Kara had been with the Danvers family for a few months, she snuck a kitten into her room.

Her room was also Alex’s room, of course, so Alex found out immediately.

She’d found the kitten in a box behind the 7-Eleven near the school, she said.

“What were you doing behind the 7-Eleven?” Alex asked.

She’d gone to get a slushie, she said. Her mother always took her for a slushie after school on the first day after spring break—it was a way to make it better to go back to class, because Kara had never liked school much. 

“Okay, that explains why you went to the 7-Eleven, but it doesn’t explain why you were  _ behind  _ it,” Alex said, exasperated.

Well, Kara explained, some of the kids from school who picked on her were hanging out by the front door. She snuck around behind the building to wait for them to leave because she didn’t want to deal with them, but she really, really wanted her slushie.

And there, she found this pathetic kitten, too weak to make much of a sound or put up a fight when Kara picked it up. So she abandoned the slushie plan, tucked the kitten into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie, and came right home.

“I couldn’t just  _ leave _ him there, Alex, with nobody!”  She cradled the kitten close to her chest, and the kitten nuzzled his little head into the skin above the collar of her shirt. “What do I do?”

Alex nodded. “Okay,” she said, “okay.” She spent a few minutes googling how to clean him, how to care for him, what he should eat. With Kara looking over her shoulder, she explained how to wash the kitten carefully in the bathroom sink, and how to pile up some towels on a heating pad (“On the lowest setting, Kara, okay?”) for him to lie on. Then, she went downstairs and lied to her parents about forgetting something in her locker at school.

“Is it even still open?” her mother asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Evening drama rehearsals.”

“Do you want a ride?” her father asked.

“No, I’ll just take my bike,” Alex said.

She rode to the same 7-Eleven where Kara had found the kitten and used some of her babysitting money to buy a small bag of cat food. There was also, to her surprise, a bottle of cat shampoo, and she bought that too.

Almost as an afterthought, she bought a purple slushie, and rode home with it wedged in her bike’s water bottle holder.

Back in her room, Alex could see where Kara had set up the nest with the towels and the heating pad, but the kitten was still nestled in the crook of her shoulder, and she was petting the back of his neck so carefully with one finger.

Alex dropped her bag on the floor. She had a little tupperware on her desk, full of paper clips and erasers and rubber bands, and she dumped it out and used it to scoop into the cat food bag.

“Here you go, little buddy,” she said as she set the bowl on the floor. Kara lifted the kitten from her neck, unhooking his claws when they caught on the fabric of her shirt, and set him in front of the food.

He sniffed at it a little, apprehensive, and then, to their great relief, began to eat.

Alex had set the slushie on her desk. When the kitten was eating comfortably, she reached up for it, and handed it to Kara.

Kara’s eyes lit up. She took a sip and grinned. “Purple is my favourite. How did you know?”

Alex cocked an eyebrow. “Lucky guess.”

They sat for a moment, watching the kitten eat, Kara sipping on her straw.

“I don’t know what would make someone do that,” Kara said. “Abandon a kitten in a box like that.”

Alex shrugged. “He might not have been abandoned. His mom might have been a stray.”

“But he was in the trash pile, Alex! Somebody had to have seen him!”

Alex wasn’t sure what to say to that. She didn’t know how to say that if she’d seen the kitten, she might not have done what Kara did—not because she didn’t care, but because she wouldn’t have thought of it as her problem to fix. She would have felt sad for the kitten, and maybe called the SPCA or something, but she wouldn’t necessarily have wrapped it up and brought it home.

But Alex was coming to realize that this, in a nutshell, was Kara. She felt such passion, such responsibility for the world, and her ability to make it a little better. And she couldn’t understand—truly couldn’t, on a visceral level—why everyone else wasn’t like her.

The bullies outside the 7-Eleven were Alex’s friends. Alex knew that, and, of course, Kara knew that. But neither of them wanted to acknowledge it, so they let it lie, implied, between them. 

The kitten secret only lasted a night. In the morning, they realized that Alex had thought of food and shampoo, and had put out a little bowl of water, but they hadn’t thought about litter. Without a litter box, the kitten had made do with Alex’s dirty gym clothes.

Alex hadn’t been angry. She’d taken the clothes to put in the wash. But her mother, suspicious of why Alex was doing laundry unprompted, had managed to weasel the story out of her.

“How could you let her do this?” her mother had exclaimed, frustrated, and Alex had grit her teeth and not said anything, because she’d learned, since Kara arrived, that there was no right answer to questions like that one.

But, in the end, she let them keep the kitten. She even went out and bought litter, and she bought a bag of kitten food to replace the adult cat food that Alex had bought. 

And Alex resolved to try to see the world a little more like Kara did.

 

—

 

Alex waited another hour before she went back to the quarantine hallway. Kara was still there, sitting in the same spot on the floor. She looked like herself again, her hands resting loose over her knees, her head resting back against the wall.

Maggie, too, was still sitting up, but she had slumped back against the wall, sitting with her eyes closed. They weren’t taking; just resting, quietly, in each other’s space. But a Alex slid down to sit next to Kara, she noticed Maggie’s eyes settling on her with a fierce, protective glint. Alex had seen that look before, when some overblown private back at the blockade would make some lewd comment about Alex’s body, or some ensign would challenge her authority, and Maggie would fill with the desire to protect her.

This time, it was Kara that Maggie was ready to protect. Alex lifted a hand to calm her: they were all on the same side here, after all. Then she sat down next to Kara, who rolled her head, wordlessly, to look at her.

“Lena told me,” Alex said, as gently as she could.

Kara recoiled immediately, her eyes going wide with fear and wet with shame, and she shifted to stand up, to move away. Alex caught her with one hand around her wrist and another on her knee and pulled her back down to the ground, and then toward her, into her body.

“We’re going to figure it out,” Alex said into her hair. 

Kara was stiff, brittle in her arms.

“I’m here for you,” Alex murmured. “We’re all here for you. We’re going to figure something out.”

A high-pitched, frightened sound escaped Kara’s lungs. “I jump awake and I don’t see her,” she gasped, “I see raiders, I see wildlife, I see any one of the things that snuck up on us when we were asleep. It’s not for long, it’s just a few seconds, but that’s all it takes. I just—I grab her by the arms and push her away. I grab her hard and I push her away from me, and then I wake up. And all I can see is that I hurt her, I _hurt_ _her_ , the most important person in the world to me and I can’t—I can’t—”

Her voice broke into a sob and Alex clutched her harder.

Alex’s mind raced. She could have Lena stay in her and Maggie’s room for the time being, while Alex was sleeping in the quarantine corridor near Maggie. But that would be a temporary solution.

She tightened her arms around Kara. “We’ll figure something out,” she said, and then immediately regretted it. It was the kind of thing people said to comfort a loved one in pain, like Kara was. But Alex didn’t like to lie to her loved ones, even to comfort them. She didn’t like to make promises she couldn’t keep, and like Lena had said: they didn’t have the right medications, they didn’t have psychiatrists. 

Kara continued to shake in Alex’s arms. Alex looked up. Maggie sat on her bed with her back to the wall, facing them. She leaned forward, bracing both elbows on her one knee, and her eyes were so full of love and longing and Alex couldn’t tell whether it was directed at her or at Kara.

Then she realized she didn’t care.

Kara’s shaking began to subside. Slowly, as though she were a frightened kitten, Alex lifted one hand and began to run her fingers through Kara’s long hair.

Of all the emergencies Alex could imagine confronting at the end of the world, this was the one she felt least equipped to handle.

She looked up at Maggie again, and Maggie offered her a small, comforting smile. It was just a little thing, barely enough to bring out the dimples, but there was something rich and genuine that Alex hadn’t seen in days or weeks. Like a spark on tinder it flared up a warmth between them, and Alex breathed deep, as though she could inhale it, and felt herself steady. She might have imagined it, but she would have sworn she felt Kara steady, too, even though her eyes were still buried in Alex’s shoulder.

_Soon,_ Maggie mouthed. Alex understood: S _ oon, I’ll be out there with you. Soon, we’ll be together to deal with this _ . 

And Alex dared to let herself believe it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to accidental intimate partner violence in this chapter. Not "accidental" as in "we bumped into each other and you got a bruise" -- "accidental" as in "I have experienced trauma that has caused my body to not be fully under my own control." Thanks to [PerformativeZippers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/performativezippers/pseuds/performativezippers) for some suggestions on how to frame this content warning.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The content warning that applied to last chapter carries forward to this one as they continue to address that problem.
> 
> As always, I can't possibly send enough thanks to [Kelinswriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter/pseuds/Kelinswriter) for all her invaluable beta-ing and also brainstorm-buddy-ing and general idea-bouncing skills.

Three days passed, and then four, of Lena sleeping in Alex’s cabin. She’d meet Kara every morning and they’d have breakfast together. In the evenings, she’d go with Kara to their shared cabin and they’d spend quiet time together. And then Lena would sit with Kara until she fell asleep, and then she’d quietly let herself out and go down the hall to sleep in Alex’s room.

Alex made Lena roll up her sleeves at the end of those three days, as high up her arms as they’d go.

The bruises were mostly healed. None were fresh.

“I meant it when I said it only happens when she’s asleep,” Lena said, but her eyes were soft, her tone thankful for Alex’s caring.

Alex had wanted to believe them both. She’d wanted to believe them, but seeing the evidence finally quieted her fears that they’d been hiding something more pernicious. Her relief ran down her spine, loosening all her muscles.

“Kara’s a different person now,” Maggie said gently to Alex, one evening, before they lay down to sleep on their respective sides of the glass. “She didn’t suddenly become a bad person, but she is a  _ different _ person. We both are. I can remember who I was before, and I keep trying to find her in me, but it’s like… I don’t know. Wearing old clothes or something. It’s not that they don’t fit, they just don’t feel right anymore. Like all my jagged edges are going to tear holes in them.” 

Alex shifted closer to the glass. “I want to know all of who you are now. I’ll love those new edges as much as I love the rest of you.”

It was late, and the haven was quiet. The furnace was dormant, the buzzing of the electricity low as everyone slept. Maggie closed her eyes, and the silence stretched long enough that Alex assumed she had fallen asleep. Alex closed her eyes, then, and strained to hear the sound of Maggie’s breathing through the microphone. Failing that, she focused on the rise and fall of her own chest, on feeling the rhythm of herself.

“I love you,” Maggie said, and Alex’s eyes flew open again.

Maggie lay still. Her eyes were still closed, but somehow she looked worried anyway, her forehead tense, her jaw set. “God, I love you so much.”

It was the first time Maggie had said that since the day she’d been lifted, sick and borderline delirious, out of her boat. 

“I love you too,” Alex said.

Maggie smiled, but her face didn’t soften. Alex lay there and watched her for a long time. When she woke up in the morning, she wasn’t sure which of them had fallen asleep first.

 

—

 

Nine days came and went of Maggie being medication and virus-free.

On the morning of the tenth day, Alex stood at the centrifuge, waiting for Maggie’s latest blood samples to spin down. There was something soothing, almost hypnotic, about staring into the spinning blur. It reminded her of surfing bigger waves up the coast and learning to get barrelled, feeling herself as the steady center of the rolling water.

“You test one tube,” Lena said, jolting Alex out of her trance, “And I’ll test the other. And if we find them both to be clean, I think we tell the Major we want to let her out today.”

Alex’s shoulders stiffened and her fingers stretched open, knuckles cracking. That had always been their plan: at ten days of a zero viral load with no medication, they felt they could say, with as much certainty as anyone could reasonably demand of them, that Maggie had fully recovered and was not at risk of contaminating the Haven.

The idea of speaking words, of giving actual voice to the hope in her chest, felt like it would jinx the whole thing. She stared back to the center of the whirring centrifuge and nodded.

Three hours later, Alex and Lena met each other again at the center of the lab.

“Okay,” Alex said, “I don’t want us to bias each other. So let’s just…” She held out a closed fist and gestured for Lena to do the same. Lena, a bemused expression on her face, put out her hand.

“On the count of three, hold out one finger if you had a zero reading, and two fingers if you had anything other than a zero reading.”

She stared at Lena’s fist, forcing herself not to try to read her face, as she counted down.

Then she stared, frozen, catatonic-feeling, at each of their single outstretched fingers, until she noticed Lena’s starting to shake.

She looked up. Lena’s grin threatened to tear her face in two and she launched herself forward to grab Alex by the elbows.

“We did it, Alex!” she said, her voice a harsh, excited whisper. “She’s come all the way home to you.”

But Alex just felt numb. Her whole body felt like a phantom, a residual limb. When she spoke, her voice felt stiff, stubborn.

“You, um, you need to go to the Major,” she said. “Please. I don’t know if anyone would find me trustworthy when it comes to Maggie, but everyone knows you are.”

Lena’s eyes turned soft and strong, and she dropped her hands to Alex’s. When she spoke, her voice was more gentle than anything Alex had heard in a long, long time. “Of course. I’ll go right now. And you’ll need to go get things ready for decontamination. Go get her some clean clothes, all right? Can you do that?”

Alex felt fractured, like synapses weren’t connecting. Lena squeezed her hands, and her kindness, not for the first time, felt like something it bottomed out in Alex’s gut. Then Lena turned to walk toward the door.

“One day, when the world is normal again, I’m going to find some way to repay you for everything,” Alex called after her. Lena stopped and turned around to look at her again. “I’m going to get you a huge gift,” Alex continued. ”I don’t know what it’ll be, but… something.”

Lena smiled again—a small, sad smile like one might give to a child who had said something sweet and precocious and impossible. 

“We’re family,” she said. “You don’t owe me a thing.”

 

—

 

The conversation with the Major was brief. Lena was back at the lab before Alex could return with clean clothes for Maggie.

“So,” Lena said, without preamble, “Should I help you with the decontamination, or do you think she’d prefer Kara? I assume you’ll need a second set of hands.”

Alex blinked. And blinked again.

“...Or should Kara and I do it?” Lena asked, a hint of teasing in her voice. 

“No!” Alex said. “No, I’ll do it. And you, not Kara. But we should tell Kara—she’ll want to be there.” 

Even if Maggie might prefer Kara, Kara didn’t know decontamination protocols. And Lena had helped Alex to cut Maggie’s clothes off for surgery, so, well, this wouldn’t be anything Lena hadn’t seen.

When Lena went to get Kara, Alex took a moment to center herself. This felt strange, surreal, like the frame should freeze and the credits start rolling any second. 

She went into the decontamination room and set Maggie’s clean clothes in a cabinet where they’d stay dry. She checked the sanitation solution levels and ensured they had enough sterile cloths and basins. This kind of routine settled her.

By the time Alex was ready, Kara and Lena were waiting for her. Kara’s hands were clenched together, white-knuckled, in front of her chest, the only thing to belie the height of her emotions. Lena had suited up in a hazmat kit with the headpiece under her arm, and she held a second kit out to Alex.

Alex inhaled deeply, the air filling her like sustenance, and then exhaled through her nose. She took the kit from Lena. “Okay,” she said, “let me suit up, and then let’s go get her.”

They entered Maggie’s quarantine chamber from the back, where it let out into the sanitation room, and when Alex stepped into the room Maggie clutched at her chest, her eyes flashing wide and frantic.

“Jesus,” she said, “you scared me. I didn’t know you were coming. More blood? ‘Cause it feels like you’ve taken all I got...”

Something in Alex’s eyes must have tipped her off, though, even through the mask, because Maggie trailed off, watching as Alex laid a hand along her jawline and then crouched down in front of her. 

“I didn’t want to jinx it,” Alex said. 

Maggie’s breath quickened, her eyes grew wide. It might have been hope, or it might have been terror; Alex couldn’t tell, and it seemed like maybe Maggie couldn’t, either. “Alex—”

“I’m tired of sleeping on that floor,” Alex said. “I want to sleep in our bed, with you, tonight.”

For a moment Maggie sat frozen, her eyes and mouth hanging open, and then, almost as an afterthought, she nodded.

Alex waved Lena in, and together they hooked their arms under Maggie’s arms and under her hips, and she grasped them over the shoulder, and they lifted her.

For the first time in more than a month, Maggie left the quarantine chamber.

Sanitation was harsh, abrasive, full of chemical solutions and high-pressure sprays, but Maggie remained stoic through all of it. And then she sat, wrapped in a sterile sheet with wet hair dripping down her back, while Alex and Lena sprayed down the outsides of their hazmat suits. And then they all sat together for five minutes, Maggie wrapped in a clean sheet, while they activated a UV light bath to decontaminate the surfaces. Through all of it, they didn’t talk beyond necessary directions—raise your arm, lean forward, turn around. 

Lena switched off the UV light, and then both she and Alex unzipped the hoods of their suits. They met each other’s eyes for a moment, and Lena smiled. She retrieved Maggie’s clean clothes and set them on the gurney beside Maggie, and then, without a word, let herself out into the corridor where Kara was waiting.

Alex unsnapped and unzipped her hazmat suit while Maggie watched, and she tossed it to the corner, out of the way. Then, carefully, as though with quick movements she might startle herself into waking up, she walked toward Maggie. She was three feet from her. Two feet. One. With no glass and no hazmat suit between them.

“Hi,” she said.

Maggie looked up at her with a sharpness in her eyes like she feared violence, and Alex realized that this had to feel even more surreal for her than it did for Alex herself.

“Hi,” Maggie said back.

Alex lifted her hand toward Maggie with the care one would give to a frightened, feral animal. She reached for her shoulder first: neutral territory, covered by the sheet.

When Alex touched her, Maggie’s eyes closed. She leaned into Alex’s hand and then lost her balance, unaccustomed to sitting up without a wall behind her; she cursed and looked down and scrambled to brace herself with her hands against the gurney, under the sheet. Alex stepped forward and grabbed both of Maggie’s shoulders to steady her. Like this, without the gloves, she could feel the details of the shape of Maggie’s body, the ropey tension of the muscles over the proud bones, and she felt them give a little as Maggie found herself and relaxed again.

Maggie looked up and laughed a little, though it seemed forced. “That’s one way to break the mood,” she said.

When Alex smiled back, her smile came easily. She lifted a hand from Maggie’s shoulder but it froze, feeling paralyzed in the air near Maggie’s cheek.

She hadn’t touched Maggie’s skin with her own in over nine months.

Her hand hovered there, waiting. Waiting for what, she didn’t really know. A sign of some sort. Confirmation that Maggie’s skin wouldn’t give way to smoke on contact. 

Maggie sat stock-still, her breathing shaky but steady.

“You have to do it,” Maggie whispered. “I’m too scared.” 

“I am too,” Alex said.

Maggie recoiled, jerking herself as far back as she could without falling again, and shook her head violently. “It’s not worth the risk, Alex,” she said. “The only thing worse than dying from this would be taking you with me—”

Those must have been the words Alex needed because, without thinking, she leaned forward, her hand on Maggie’s cheek, fingertips curling around the back of her neck to stop her from pulling further away.

“I’m not scared of that,” Alex said.

Maggie stared up at her through wide eyes, breathing deep and hard, and Alex stood over her, frozen, and only then, in this delayed moment, did either of them realize that the skin of Alex’s palm was touching the skin of Maggie’s face.

They froze like that for a moment. And then, carefully, with all the tenderness she possessed, Alex moved her thumb.

Alex had touched a lot of skin in her life. It came with the job, and she had never really seen the poetry of the feel of one person’s skin over another. 

And yet, Alex thought. And yet she felt tears surging to her eyes anyway; she felt some part of her zeroing in on that spot of contact. It was the heart of the centrifuge. It was the still barrel of a perfect wave, spinning hard around her, centering her and surging some part of her forward. 

Maggie’s eyes slid closed and she turned her face into Alex’s touch, nuzzling into her palm. She pressed a kiss to the inside of Alex’s wrist, and Alex gasped, something harsh and broken and elated and devastated, and dove forward, dove into Maggie’s arms as Maggie let herself fall forward into Alex’s chest.

Alex sobbed.

Maggie was still, apart from the hand she drew up and down Alex’s spine. But she wasn’t stiff; she held strong, firm and solid but warm and soft, a century oak in a tempest. When Alex sat back, she saw that both of their faces were wet.

She pushed her thumb through Maggie’s tears, and then ran the her hand under her runny nose and sniffed.

That was it, then. If there was infection to be transmitted, Alex had just caught it.

Alex knew the story of Orpheus, who looked back too soon and doomed his beloved to hell and himself to misery. She’d looked back, now, and she could only hope she’d waited long enough, and climbed high enough. But the line had been crossed, so no more harm could be done by indulging in the benefits of the transgression. 

Alex ducked her head and kissed Maggie, snot and tears be damned.

Maggie hiccuped and froze, her mouth stiff and open, while Alex brushed their lips together, drawing Maggie’s breath into her lungs.

And then Maggie gasped and sobbed and kissed her back, deep and hard and full, like a woman afraid to die. 

 

—

 

Alex helped Maggie dress. It was a fickle and finicky affair: part careful balancing of Maggie’s body, part giddy laughter when Alex accidentally poked Maggie in the ribs or when Maggie tried to put her head through one of the arm holes of her shirt. Getting the pants on was the most awkward part of the job: Maggie had to lie on her back on the gurney and use her heel to lever her pelvis up while Alex tugged the waistband over her hips. Once it was done, one pant leg hung like a deflated balloon from the amputation point at her mid-thigh.

“We can cut that off and stitch it,” Alex said. “I was just afraid of cutting it too short if I couldn’t measure it on you first.

Maggie shrugged. “Sure.”

Alex slipped an arm under both of Maggie’s, and Maggie threw an arm around Alex’s neck, and together, carefully, they got Maggie standing on her good leg.

It went better than Alex had feared—Maggie had been obsessive about doing leg exercises in the previous weeks. But it still took an adjustment as Maggie stood, fully, for the first time in more than a month, and then, leaning heavily on Alex, hopped to the sanitation room door. 

Kara and Lena were sitting on the floor, leaning on the wall opposite the door. They scrambled to their feet as it opened.

“What took you so long?” Kara exclaimed, only half serious. “I was getting ready to bust in there!”

Lena caught Alex’s eyes and smiled: she would never have let that happen, of course. 

Alex held the door open with one hand as she and Maggie made their way through, but almost immediately Kara leapt across to Maggie’s other side. The extra support made Maggie sigh in relief, and when the door clicked closed behind them, Maggie slipped her arm off of Alex’s shoulders to throw both, tight, around Kara’s neck.

Kara held Maggie with enough strength to lift her off the ground, her face buried in Maggie’s still-wet hair. 

They stood like that for a long time, and even after Kara set Maggie down again, they swayed a little together. Alex could see them exchanging whispered words but resisted the urge to eavesdrop. If their words were for her, they’d share them.

When they eventually broke apart, Kara kept an arm around Maggie’s back to steady her, and gave Lena a moment to step forward.

Lena and Maggie had known each other before Maggie and Kara had left, but they weren’t close, and Lena looked nervous, her palms running up and down her thighs. It had to be strange, Alex thought: Lena had helped with the incredibly intimate process of decontamination, but now, back in the outside, she didn’t know where they stood. 

“I’m so glad to see you well, Maggie,” Lena said.

And Maggie, with one arm still around Kara, reached out for a hug. 

Lena smiled and stepped into it. Maggie had half-sagged into her hug with Kara, but Lena always stood tall and regal, and her hug drew Maggie up so that Maggie, too, looked tall and regal. But it was a warm hug, a tight one, and somehow, leaning into Lena, Maggie looked proud.

“Thank you,” Maggie said. “I’ll never be able to repay you.”

“This is all the repayment I need,” Lena said.

(Alex knew Lena so well, now, that she often forgot that she was  _ Lena Luthor _ , billionaire wunderkind CEO of L-Corp, before all this began. That she’d given up penthouses, servants, private jets, to come to this haven and work toward a cure. That the idea of ‘repayment’ was a laugh, for her.

That she’d given all that up to put Maggie back in Alex’s arms.)

Alex held Maggie up from one side and Kara from the other as they made their slow way along the gangways and corridors that led to their cabin. Lena walked ahead of them, opening doors and clearing obstacles from the path. It wasn’t a long walk, but Maggie, who had to haul her body along in an awkward swing-hopping movement, had to pause for breaks and was panting by the end of it anyway. 

When they finally got to the room, Maggie lay down on top of the blanket and tried to catch her breath. The bed was neatly made, and Alex realized that during the decontamination, Kara must have come and put on fresh sheets.

“Holy shit,” Maggie panted, staring up at the ceiling. She clutched at her chest with one hand. “Jesus.” Alex sat on the edge of he bed beside her, and Maggie blinked up at her. “Don’t suppose you’ve had any luck finding some crutches for me?”

This was a question Alex had dreaded. Because she hadn’t found crutches; she hadn’t even looked for them, so afraid had she been to tempt fate. 

But Lena, remarkable Lena, came to her aid. “There’s a guy in Engineering who thinks he can probably weld you some out of scraps they’ve got down there, but it’ll be a few days. You’ll need to go down there so he can measure the length you need.”

“And until then, we’ll help you get wherever you want to go,” Kara said.

Maggie nodded, but she kept her eyes locked on the ceiling.

Alex slipped her hand into Maggie’s and squeezed, and Maggie’s labored breaths were the only sound in the room for a long moment. Then the floor creaked, the warped metal popping as Kara shifted her weight from one foot to the next. Alex looked over. Kara’s hands were clenched at her sides, her shoulders hitched up and tense. Something about her seemed to vibrate, and as Alex watched it accelerated exponentially, its tension tightening her spine and her knees and her teeth.

Kara was looking down at Maggie, so Alex looked to Lena, whose eyes were wide. She’d clearly noticed the strange tension, too, and when her eyes met Alex’s, she shrugged a little as if to say,  _ I don’t know either. _

Lena slipped one hand into Kara’s, the other hand drawn to the small of her back, and Kara softened at the touch.

“Darling,” Lena said, “let’s leave them to get settled, shall we?” Then she turned to Alex. “We’ll meet you in an hour to go down for dinner?”

Alex nodded. “Sure.” She looked at Maggie, whose breath was finally beginning to slow. “How does that sound, Maggie? Dinner in an hour?”

Maggie tipped her eyes toward Alex’s and then, almost as an afterthought, her lips forced a smile. “Sure. That sounds good.” She looked at Lena, and then Kara, and smiled at them, but the smile felt like something carved from the inside out. 

With a gentle touch and whispered words, Lena led Kara out of the room and closed the door behind them. They’d have to find a new solution for Lena to sleep, Alex realized. They’d have to come up with something.

The new quiet of the room did little to calm Maggie, though her breathing was finally back to normal. She slipped her hand out of Alex’s and tried to comb her fingers through her drying hair, but they snagged on the knots.   
  
“Here,” Alex said, as she reached across for the comb on the shelf. “Sit up and I’ll comb it for you.”   
  
“I can do it,” Maggie said. She planted her palms near her hips and pushed, her wrists shaking a bit, to lever herself up. Alex reached for her shoulder to help her, but as soon as their bodies touched, Maggie stiffened and jerked away. “I said I can  _ do _ it.” 

Alex pulled her hand back toward her own shoulder, but her heart raced, a whole new kind of fear bubbling up in it. Because here they were, in their room, with nothing but air between them, and the distance felt greater than when Maggie had still been in quarantine.

The comb on the shelf was beyond Maggie’s reach so Alex stretched for it again. Maggie took it without a word and then began to tug it roughly through the knotted tips of her hair. Alex could hear the strands of hair tearing, but she kept her fists clenched in her own lap.

This was not the blissful reunion she’d been hoping for.

She inhaled, and her breath shook. “I’ve missed you. It’s been so cold in here without you.” 

“Cold,” Maggie said, with a sound that might have been a laugh in some former life. “Yeah, I bet. You’re a human ice cube.” Her comb was gathering a nest of broken strands in its teeth, but Maggie kept working at it, shredding her hair into submission. Alex wanted to stop her—to lay her hands over Maggie’s hands, to say  _ be kind to the body that worked so hard to survive _ , to coax the tangles out until the hair came closer to shining the way it used to. But she could tell that that wouldn’t go over well, so she sat still, her hands pressed between her knees, and watched Maggie work.

“What do you want to do now?” Alex asked. “Are you hungry? I can get Kara or Lena and we can go down to the mess, Or, gosh, you probably want to use the bathroom, right?”

If there were ever a clear sign that Alex was feeling flustered, her use of the word “gosh” was it. 

“Honestly, Danvers, I’m tired,” Maggie said. “I think I just want to lie down for a bit. You should go to the lab, you probably have a ton to do.”

“The lab can wait a few more hours,” Alex said. She scooted forward a bit and laid a hand on Maggie’s jaw. Maggie stilled, her comb halfway through her hair, and then something in her wilted. Both of her hands fell to her lap. She lifted her eyes to Alex’s and then closed them and leaned gently into the touch.

Maggie’s jaw felt sharper than it had, as Maggie was thinner than she used to be. It felt stronger, too. Alex slid forward again and tipped her forehead down until it touched Maggie’s. She could smell the residual disinfectant on Maggie’s skin. Then Maggie tilted her head further still, dropped it down to the curve of Alex’s neck, and Alex could feel her breath on her collarbone. Maggie’s scapulae were sharp under her shirt and Alex cupped them with her palms. She lowered her own head and kissed Maggie’s ear, her temple, the crook of her jaw.   
  
“I didn’t think this far ahead,” Maggie confessed. “I don’t know what to do now.”

Alex hummed. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. Slowly she turned and lifted her legs onto the bed, and together they lay down, stretching out until Maggie’s head rested in the hollow of Alex’s shoulder. The forgotten comb lay abandoned between their hips; Alex tugged it free and dropped it to the floor beside their bed,and then carded her fingers through Maggie’s hair until Maggie fell asleep.

In all those days in the quarantine hall, all those nights camped out pressed to a glass window, she hadn’t thought about this part. She hadn’t let herself: the risk was too high that she’d start hoping for great things only to be devastated when Maggie never made it out of the chamber.   


She lay there, and felt Maggie breathe. She felt the impossibility of Maggie’s breathing, the slightly unusual balance of the way their bodies fit together now. The way her shoulder began to feel wet as Maggie’s damp hair soaked through her shirt. Maggie’s shirt had ridden up and Alex let her fingertips touch the hollow of her spine, right where it disappeared into her waistband. Maggie’s vertebrae were too prominent, and Alex’s finger traced over one of them. Even in sleep, the hair of Maggie’s back rose a little, like a happy cat, and Maggie settled closer, some of the tension falling out of her hips. 

Her finger moved again, little circles in the small of Maggie’s back. It was a sweet, gentle intimacy, the kind of sensual touch that wasn’t erotic but could only be shared between lovers. More than sex, more than kisses, these were the moments Alex had missed. This presence, this warmth, this casual closeness.

There would be time to worry later, she decided. She turned her head, pressed a kiss to Maggie’s scalp, and let herself breathe the scent of her skin.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, folks. Hopefully the length of the chapter makes up for it. Chapters 8 and 9 are fully written. Going to try to make a dent in 10 before posting 8, but there shouldn't be another two month wait. It's been a crazy summer.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to @kelinswriter for pointing out the significant plot hole in this chapter and making me fix it.

Kara and Lena brought Alex and Maggie supper trays that night, and breakfast in the morning. For lunch, they decided to make the trip down to the mess hall, all four of them. Kara and Alex slipped their arms under Maggie’s shoulders and half carried her, but still they had to take frequent breaks to let her rest and catch her breath. The stairs took ages, with Maggie pausing often to lean on the railing and gasp for breath. A few people came up behind them, saw what they were doing, and opted to redirect to the other stairwell on the far side of the haven. This struck Alex as excessive—there was plenty of space to go around—but it was up to them, she supposed.

When they finally made it to the mess hall, though, the detour made more sense.   
  
The room was small, but it was busy, and it went silent when they entered. All eyes turned to them.

Lena, Kara, Maggie, and Alex stood uncomfortably in the sudden quiet. Maggie began to slide her arms down from Kara and Alex’s shoulders, though they still had a ways to walk to the nearest empty table. Alex understood: under the weight of such heavy gazes, she wanted to stand under her own power.

It was Lena, finally, who broke the stalemate. There was a table not too far away, and she stepped forward to try to clear a path to it. Some people stood up from their chairs and stepped out of the way. Others scooted their chairs forward to create more room. And still others parked themselves with surprising ire, refusing to budge.   
  
The faces in the room were inscrutable. Many of them were runners who had travelled with Maggie, and with Kara, too. Several had come to offer Alex and Lena kindness or condolences when it began to look like Maggie and Kara wouldn’t be coming home.   
  
Alex and Kara slid their arms under Maggie’s again and they began their arduous, awkward journey to the table. The silence in the room held, broken only by the scuffing of their feet and Maggie’s occasional hisses of exertion. As they moved through the crowd, though, the faces around them began to change, some looking at Maggie with something like reverence, others with fear, and still others with something that looked like hatred.

One man, a young guy Alex recognized as a recent promotion from ensign to runner, stuck out his leg, tripping Kara. Kara caught herself, but Maggie had to grip fiercely at Alex’s neck to keep from going down too.

“The hell is your problem?” Kara said as she righted herself, her voice all the more deadly for being so calm.

“My problem?” The guy huffed a contemptuous breath. “My problem is  _ our _ problem. She—” he jerked his chin at Maggie— “was infected, and now she’s here, outside quarantine, exposing the entire haven to the virus—”

“Mike.” A woman from his table grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”

“We could all die,” he said, getting louder now. “I carried her up from the fucking boat. I saw her. Nobody recovers when they’re that far along. Nobody recovers  _ ever _ .”

Alex could feel her temper rising. Her bone-deep exhaustion weighed on nerves already shredded from a month of stress and worry. Maggie’s tension telegraphed through the places their skin touched, thorugh the tension of her shoulders and back so that Alex could feel it in her own body.

She stiffened and began to shift Maggie’s weight over to Kara’s shoulders, intent on impressing a few truths upon Mike with her words or her fists, but Maggie’s grip tightened.

“Don’t,” she said.

But the tension vibrated in Alex’s body like electricity, like fuel. It had to go somewhere. She wanted to drive it into Mike’s jaw, into his pretty-boy face that was pinched with apoplectic rage. 

“Don’t,” Maggie said again. A hand gripped Alex’s shoulder: Kara’s, behind Maggie’s back.

Mike had stood up between Alex and Lena, so Alex could see Lena now, her nostrils flaring with rage, her eyes filled with angry contempt as they watched him. Then they shifted to Alex’s, and softened. The barest movement of her head, a tight twitch of the jaw.  _ No, Alex. Don’t do it. _

The woman at the table tugged on Mike’s wrist again. “Stop,” she said. “What if it were you?”

But Mike didn’t move, his fists still clenched at his sides.

“You’re a runner now, Mike,” Kara said, with a familiarity that made Alex wonder if they’d spoken before. Her voice was gentle but firm, and shaded with a world-weariness that was still new to Alex but seemed to have woven itself deep into the fibres of Kara’s being. 

Alex understood the things Kara did not say: that being a runner meant being exposed to the plague every time he went ashore. 

That he might find he needed Alex’s help one day.

“We just want to sit down and eat,” Lena said. Mike jerked a little: he’d forgotten her, behind him.

“Sit down, Mike,” Mike’s friend said.

With a scowl, his hateful gaze skipping between Alex, Maggie, and Kara, he dropped slowly into his chair. 

The room stayed quiet as they hobbled their way to the table, the silence broken only by the sound of chairs scooting out of their way and Maggie’s occasional gasps for breath. She’d been tired already, by the time they made it to the mess hall, but she trembled with exhaustion now, the strain of the confrontation piling onto the physical strain of their long walk. When Kara and Alex finally helped her into a chair, she sagged forward onto shaking arms, her elbows braced on the tabletop. 

Alex sat in the chair beside hers and ducked her head to catch Maggie’s downcast eyes. She rubbed small circles on Maggie’s back. “You okay?”

Maggie nodded. “I’m fine.”

“We don’t have to stay.”

“I said I’m fine,” Maggie repeated with an anger Alex hadn’t expected. Alex sat up straighter, pulling away. Kara had taken the seat on Maggie’s other side and was looking down at Maggie with concern. Alex looked over at Lena and found Lena looking back at her, kindness in her eyes. 

“I’ll sit with Maggie if you guys would go grab us trays,” Alex said. But Maggie stiffened.

“You know,” Kara said carefully, “you haven’t gotten to choose your own tray in a month, Alex. Let me stay with Maggie.”

It was kind of Kara to try to frame it like she was offering for Alex’s benefit, and not because Kara, and not Alex, was the person Maggie needed with her in that moment.

Alex realized that she would have to learn to live with this new normal: that Kara, to Maggie, was no longer just Alex’s little sister. That their relationship had become something unique, living apart from Alex.

A heat welled up in Alex’s chest, and she couldn’t figure out whether it was warmth at the idea, or jealousy, or fear, but the impulse to move away from it was sudden and powerful. So she squeezed Maggie’s shoulder once and then stood up and took Kara’s offer, leaving the two of them alone and following Lena toward the serving area. 

“Are you all right?” Lena asked.

Alex let out a heavy breath. She did not feel all right, but her feelings were too heavy and complicated to try to explain, so she just nodded. “Just angry,” she said. “Angry and tired.” 

Lena was wearing short sleeves, and her arms had fully healed. Beginning tonight, though, she wouldn’t be able to sleep in Alex’s room anymore. 

“We need to figure out what to do about your sleeping situation,” Alex said. “Maybe the major would allot you your own room?”

Lena reached for two plates of mushy peas and shook her head. “We’re going to try sharing again. I’ll take the bed, Kara will sleep on the floor. I suggested the reverse of that, but she said she’d worry about waking up in a panic and falling out of bed on top of me.”

“That didn’t happen when she was sleeping in the bed alone, though?”

Lena looked abashed: she had revealed something she didn’t mean to reveal.

“Jesus,” Alex said. She’s been so fixated on Maggie, so preoccupied, that she hadn’t noticed that Kara was suffering.

“She thinks she might sleep better knowing I’m there,” Lena said. “Out there, she and Maggie would take turns watching over each other as they slept. It’s got to be hard to sleep by yourself when your life has been so dangerous for so long.”

Alex’s mouth tightened. She didn’t say anything as she reached for two servings of whatever synthetic protein they were being served that day, and two servings of rice. She remembered the first plague, and the night when Maggie’s checkpoint was attacked. She remembered how she’d struggled to sleep without her for every night since. Finally, she nodded. “Let me know how it goes,” she said. “If you need to bunk with Maggie and me for a bit, we’ll work it out.”

Lena hummed. It was a confirmation that she had heard Alex’s offer, but not a commitment to take it up. They finished loading their trays, and Lena followed Alex toward the exit lanes where their portions would be tagged to their ration quotas.

“How about you?” Lena asked, while they waited. “How are you two doing?”

The careful neutrality of Lena’s question, of her wording and her tone, felt loaded to Alex. Alex knew that she and Maggie weren’t behaving like some storybook version of reunited lovers. They’d fallen into each other’s arms in those first moments in the decontamination room, but since then, Maggie had been quiet and reserved.

But storybooks were storybooks, not real life. Storybook characters didn’t have scars that wouldn’t heal. In romance novels, all the damage people suffered was just there to provide tension, to make the ultimate romantic resolution that much sweeter. Maggie was tense, and she had been since she’d realized she was going to live.

That realization hit Alex with the force of a ten-foot wave:  _ Maggie had been tense and quiet since she’d realized she was going to live. _

Alex glanced back at Lena, who was looking at her with gentle understanding.

“The women who left us aren’t the same as the women who came home,” Lena said. “We love them just as much. I’m just as committed, and I think you are, too. But it feels like starting over.”

The line moved forward, and it was Alex’s turn, and she was grateful that the ensign waiting with the scanner and keypad kept her from having to respond. She was grateful that Lena’s hands were full with her heavy tray, which meant she couldn’t lay a comforting palm between Alex’s shoulder blades the way Alex knew she would have done if she could.

While Alex waited for Lena to be scanned out, she looked across the room at the table where Kara and Maggie waited. They leaned toward each other, elbows on the table, like they were sharing confidences.  Maggie’s posture had lost a bit of its tension.

They had changed, and now they knew each other better than anyone else could know them, Alex realized.

Kara noticed Alex and Lena approaching and sat up, breaking the bubble of intimacy she’d formed with Maggie. Alex had picked up two of every course, and she set one of everything in front of Maggie: canned peas, canned fruit, powdered mashed potatoes, some kind of synthetic protein, rice pudding, water. Maggie took each bowl and arranged them in front of her with striking care: the protein, peas, and potatoes in a tight triangle in front of her, the rice pudding above and to the left, the water above and to the right. This attention to detail, the crafting of this minute bit of everyday aesthetics, made Alex feel relieved. This wasn’t the behaviour of someone who had lost herself to her own darkness, was it? Surely it couldn’t be. 

Alex arranged her own bowls and then picked up her spork. Something cool touched her free hand, resting in her lap: Maggie’s fingertips.

Alex looked down at them, and then looked over at Maggie as she felt Maggie tuck her fingers into Alex’s palm. She had reached awkwardly across herself, her left hand to Alex’s left hand, just to let their skin touch.

“Thank you,” Maggie said. It was thanks for the meal, of course, but Alex felt it deeper than that. She squeezed Maggie’s fingers in her palm.

They ate without much conversation, but throughout the meal, Maggie’s fingers remained tangled with Alex’s under the table.

Kara was stacking their dirty dishes onto a tray when a man paused by their table, behind Lena. He was tall, with dark hair and olive skin, and greeted Lena first with some familiarity.

“I’m Jack,” he said, and smiled. “I’m in engineering. Lena spoke to me about someone needing crutches?”

Maggie eyed him with some apprehension. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s me.”

He smiled at her. “I think I’ve rustled up the materials I’ll need. When do you want to come down for measurements?”

For the first time since they left the decontamination room, Alex saw Maggie smile, broad and genuine.

“This afternoon,” Alex said. 

Maggie turned and looked at her with surprise, and Alex faltered. “I mean, right?” Alex asked. “Unless you don’t want to?”

“No,” Maggie said, “this afternoon is great.”

“I’m free now,” Jack offered. “I mean, not  _ right _ now, I still need to eat. But right after?”

“Well, I move slowly,” Maggie said, and then laughed a little.

God, Alex wanted to hear more of that laugh.

“So if we start or way down there now, you’ll probably finish eating and then catch us on the way.” Then she seemed to catch herself, eyes jumping over to Lena and Kara. “I mean, if you’re okay to help me get down there?” she said. “We can go later if you have other things—”

“Maggie,” Kara interrupted, “of course we’ll help.”

Maggie smiled.

Alex wondered if this meant that everything, maybe, would be okay.

 

—

 

Jack measured Maggie for the crutches and then told her to come back in two days so they could test out the rough build together. Maggie seemed optimistic, almost happy, when she left Engineering with her arms slung over Alex and Kara’s shoulders, but as they made their slow, painstaking way back toward their room, that positive energy faded by the step. Maggie insisted on doing her best to haul herself up the ladders without help, though Alex followed below her, braced to catch her if she slipped. When they finally made it to their floor, Maggie, sweating and breathing hard, asked if they could take her to the head and the showers instead. She forced a smile when she made the request, but Alex could tell that even Lena saw how forced it looked.

They went to the head, and Kara and Lena left them there. Alex helped Maggie hobble into one of the shower stalls. 

“I can shower, right?” Maggie asked. “No more sponge baths?”

“No more sponge baths.” Alex smiled. “Let’s get undressed.”

But Maggie’s eyes went suddenly hard. “No.”

Alex froze, her hands gripping the hem of her own shirt. “No?”

“I can do it myself,” Maggie said. “I just need something to sit on.”

Maggie’s voice was quiet, but it echoed off the cracked tiles of the empty shower room, coming at Alex from all sides. The trend line of Maggie’s tension began to resolve in Alex’s mind. Her hands uncurled from the hem of her shirt, her shoulders dropping.

“Maggie,” she said. “You’re going to need help for a while for some of these things. It’s okay.”

“I know, Alex!” Maggie’s voice wasn’t quiet now, and Alex’s body vibrated from its echo, a thread in a storm. “I need help with pretty much everything. But if you can grab me a bucket to sit on and hand me the shower hose, I think maybe this is one thing I can handle on my own.”

Alex swallowed. Without a word, she went and picked up a bucket from the stack near the shower entrance, and then set it on the ground, inverted, near where Maggie stood with one hand on the wall. Still without words, she stood and watched while Maggie worked herself out of her shirt and got her pants down below her ass before pausing. She looked down past her hips to the floor as though it were a long way away.

“I need you to help me get down,” Maggie said, so quietly that Alex wouldn’t have heard it if she hadn’t been listening for any sounds of distress.

Without a word, Alex offered Maggie her shoulder, and together they moved down so that Maggie could sit on the bucket and pull her clothes the rest of the way off her legs.

Alex handed her the hose, and adjusted the water, and then took Maggie’s clothes with her into the corridor so they’d stay dry. She leaned on the metal wall, there, and waited.

From her spot by the door, Alex could hear the water running, and then she could hear it turn off. She stood there a few minutes longer, thinking she’d give Maggie time to towel off before bringing her clothes back to her. But then there was a clatter, a thump, and then a hollow falling sound--

Alex bolted back into the showers. 

Maggie was half-sprawled on the floor. The bucket she’d been sitting on was a few feet away, tipped on its side and rocking like an empty cradle in a horror movie.

Alex realized, suddenly, that Maggie didn’t have a towel. Of course she didn’t: Alex hadn’t handed her one, and they were stored on the shelf above the showerhead.

She stashed Maggie’s clothes up on top of the towels and crouched down. With her arms wrapped under Maggie’s arms, she lifted them both to their feet, and then reached for a towel with one hand while Maggie steadied herself against her other arm. 

Finally, she looked Maggie in the face, but Maggie refused to meet her eyes. Maggie’s own eyes were red-rimmed, and Alex could see her clenching the fingers of one hand.

Without a word, Alex unfolded the towel and handed it over. Maggie took it and mopped at her wet face.

“You should have called for me,” Alex said.”

Maggie looked away, busying herself by running the towel over her hair. “I have to learn to stand up by myself, Alex,” she said, eventually. “This is not the last time I’m going to fall while I’m trying to figure it out."

“Your muscles are weak,” Alex pressed, her voice hard, its echo sharp against the tile. “You need to be patient with yourself.” She knew she should probably try to contain her anger; that voicing her frustration wouldn’t improve the situation. But Maggie needed to learn to accept help for awhile or she was going to delay her recovery even further.

“My muscles will stay weak if I don’t work them hard,” Maggie said, her voice sounding as tired as she looked. 

“You  _ have _ worked them hard!” Alex said. “You’ve been hauling yourself all over this haven all day!”

Maggie jerked her arm away from Alex and managed, after some wobbling, to stand by herself. She dragged the towel down both her arms, down her front, and then stretched it between her hands to dry down her back and her ass. Alex stood back and watched, her muscles tense with readiness to jump forward and catch Maggie the moment she started to wobble.

Maggie spoke, but Alex couldn’t hear her.

“Sorry?” she asked.

“I can’t get my leg,” Maggie said, her voice rough. She cleared her throat and said, as though she were making a point: “I need help.”

So Alex took the towel and crouched down. She felt a chest-deep tension that might have been anger, but she forced her touch to be gentle despite it. She knew that what she was feeling could have been sadness, too, in a different moment, or it could have been fear. She felt like a child, confronted with incomprehensible emotions and combating the impulse to just lash out as the easiest way of coping with them.

She was gentle, still, as she helped Maggie get dressed. They didn’t talk. They didn’t talk as they hobbled their way down the corridor to their room. They sat down on the edge of the bed. After a few moments Maggie planted her palms and began to scoot herself backward onto the mattress. It took machinations for her to lie down, to twist and stretch out without losing her balance or hitting her head on the bulkhead behind her. Alex lifted her hands once to help, but Maggie glared at her. So she pulled her hands back to herself and slid out of the way to give Maggie more room to maneuver, watching until she lay with her head on the pillow. Alex contemplated laying down, too, but Maggie’s body did not seem inviting; holding it would have felt like holding rebar. 

They were still for a time. The silence felt like hardening concrete, but Alex was determined not to push, not to chip away at it. She rubbed her thumb into the seam of the side of her pants, grounding herself in its friction.

Maggie’s deep breath broke the quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

Alex swallowed, her eyes locked on the space between her knees. “I’m just trying to be here for you.”

“I know.”

There was something, a throatiness, a tremor in Maggie’s voice, that made Alex look over. Maggie’s eyes were wet, their edges pink, and her lips and chin had drawn tight in a way that Alex had only rarely seen in all their time together.

She was trying so hard to be strong, Alex knew, when everything in her wanted to break.

“Hey,” Alex said. She turned a little, lifting her knee further onto the mattress so she could lean over Maggie’s body and lay a hand on her cheek. “Hey. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

Maggie’s mouth opened, and it closed. It opened and closed again. And then she shook her head, something almost desperate in her eyes, something keeping her from speaking. Perhaps, Alex thought, she just didn’t have any words.

So Alex kicked off her boots and lay down beside her, folding her body around Maggie’s the way Maggie used to fold her body around Alex’s. It felt rigid, at first, like she’d expected, but it softened almost right away, Maggie’s body softening to the warmth of Alex’s. 

They lay there like that, just breathing together, for a long time.

 

\--

 

Maggie had been an incredible dancer.

She and Alex had been living together in National City for months before Alex found this out.

Alex got home one evening to the sound of a kind of music she hadn’t heard in a long, long time. The music collection they had in the house was old — Alex’s CD collection from her teenage years, or the Mp3s she’d bought back before everyone switched over to streaming services. What a waste of money Spotify had been, Alex thought; it had gone offline during the plague and never come back, and now all Alex could think about was the CDs they could be listening to now if she’d bought one every month instead of pissing away her money on a stupid subscription.

So they listened to Barenaked Ladies and My Chemical Romance and Garbage and Beyoncé and early Drake every night while they cooked dinner together, and they reminisced about high school dances and the songs that had been on the radio when they’d been learning to drive. But that night, she came home to the sound of something totally different. Drums, pianos, trumpets… a cowbell? A whistle?

In the kitchen, Maggie was chopping vegetables, her feet shuffling in place.

“Maggie? What is this?”

Maggie spun at the sound of Alex’s voice and faced her with a grin unlike any Alex had ever seen.

“Fania All Stars!” She set the knife on the counter and danced up to Alex using... actual footwork? In Alex’s life, dancing had always been a sort of rhythmic swaying, maybe with a little grinding in her drunken grad school days, and usually, Maggie danced with her the same way. But now Maggie moved like she knew how all the parts of herself fit together, like her body was firm but her joints were liquid.

Maggie grabbed Alex’s hand with one of hers, and set her other hand on Alex’s waist. “My buddy in Gotham sent a bunch of my CDs! Apparently the asholes who looted my apartment didn’t see any value in them.” 

“Oh,” was all Alex could say, because suddenly she was moving, too--clumsily, but in time with the music, a ham-fisted mirror copy of Maggie’s fluid steps as Maggie guided her with her hands. Maggie danced her around the kitchen island, lip-syncing words in Spanish that Alex couldn’t understand, and Alex had no earthly idea what she was doing but somehow Maggie’s body always showed her exactly where to go. Suddenly she was spinning under Maggie’s arm, and then back into the frame of her again; suddenly their bodies were pressed together, hips flush and moving in tandem, and suddenly they were apart again, Maggie’s hands and arms and shoulders moving her exactly where she wanted her to be.

“You’re a natural, Danvers!” she said, when the song ended. They collapsed, giggling and panting, against the back of the sofa.

Alex laughed and then inhaled deeply, trying to catch her breath. “I didn’t know you could dance like that.” 

Maggie looked away, coy. “My dad loved this stuff. Since I could walk, he was always dancing with me.”

Alex was quiet. Maggie didn’t talk about her father often, or her childhood. She didn’t often dwell on the good memories, she said, because they made the bad ones burn that much hotter. But she seemed to want to talk about him now.

“Back in like the 70s and early 80s, he would travel to Omaha or Lincoln on his off weekends,” she said. “There would be parties in warehouses and old barns, and it was like every Latino in the state would be there. And this is what they played. He said he was pissed, at first, that they didn’t play more Mexican music. But he learned to love this Cuban-American stuff, and the Puerto Rican stuff. He and my mom met at one of those parties.”

That music soon became Alex’s favourite, too, not so much because of the music itself, but because of the energy it gave to Maggie. The more they danced together, the better Alex got at it, until, after a few months, Maggie paused at the end of a song, breathing hard in Alex’s space, and said, “I like the way you move.”

Alex, half lost in the way the moment made her feel, said, “I like the way you move me.”

Later, when she’d think back on it, she’d wonder if she should be embarrassed over having delivered a line quite that bad.

But given how firmly Maggie had pushed her down on the couch, and how thoroughly Alex let Maggie move her in the half hour that followed, she didn’t seem to have any complaints.

 

—

 

A strange thing happened in the morning.

Alex and Maggie woke up, and dressed, and opened the door to their room to begin the walk down to the mess hall.

In the doorway, there was a small parcel — something wrapped up in a bit of cloth that had probably been a bandanna at some point in its life.

Alex looked around. There was nobody on the walkway, nobody nearby that she could see who might have left it there, and she didn’t recognize it.

“What is it?” Maggie asked. Alex crouched down to pick the package up. It was tied tidily, like someone had done it with care.

“Do you think I should open it?” Alex asked.

Maggie held out her hand and Alex passed it over. Maggie worked it in her hands, feeling through the layers of fabric with her fingertips, and then furrowed her brow and began to tug at the knot.

“Shit,” she muttered.

“What?” Alex asked.

But Maggie didn’t need to answer: she had managed to untie the cloth, and there, in the centre, lay a ring. A gold band with a diamond. 

An engagement ring.

For a moment, they both stared at it.

“Do you know whose this is?” Maggie asked.

Alex shook her head. “No idea.”

Maggie squinted at it, looking for initials, an inscription, something, but there was nothing. Alex took it back and inspected it. The inside of the band shone and was perfectly smooth; the outside was nicked and scratched with wear. 

“Someone loved this ring,” she said. “Wore it all the time.”

Maggie nodded, then shrugged. “Let’s just take it down to breakfast and ask around.”

“Do you think we should?” Alex asked. “They clearly left it here on purpose.”

“You guys look like you’re plotting something.”

Alex looked up. She hadn’t heard Kara and Lena approach, but here they were, hand in hand. Kara smiled. “You’ve got your heads together like you’re trying to crack a code,” she continued.

“Sort of,” Maggie said. She took the ring from Alex’s hand and held it out. “This mean anything to you?”

Kara took the ring and squinted at it, turning it between her fingers, and then handed it to Lena, who did the same. “Not familiar to me,” Kara said. “Why?”

“Someone left it here,” Alex said. “Like a gift, or something.”

Kara stiffened. Then, without warning, she snatched the ring from Lena’s hand and pressed it back toward Alex.

“You need to find who it belongs to, and you need to give it back,” she said, with strange insistence.

Alex took the ring and turned between her fingers.“I don’t know. I mean, whoever left it clearly wanted us to have it.”

“Okay, but why?” Kara asked. Then she turned to Maggie. “You know why. I know you do.” 

Maggie flinched and averted her eyes, casting them toward the floor, toward the spot where the ring had been left.

“Maggie,” Kara insisted. “You know you can’t keep this. It isn’t right.”

Maggie faltered for a moment, but then she nodded.

Alex watched the exchange with some confusion. She glanced up and was relieved to see that Lena looked lost, too. 

“Let’s take it down to breakfast,” Maggie said. “We’ll see if we can find the owner.”

Alex nodded. She folded the ring back into the cloth and slipped it into her pocket, and they said nothing more as they began the trek down to the mess. 

They ate quietly. Maggie, Lena, and Kara waited at the table while Alex walked from one table to the next, showing the ring and asking if anybody knew to whom it belonged. A few people took it for a closer look, but nobody claimed to recognize it, so after ten futile minutes, Alex returned to the table.

“Try again at lunch,” Kara said with surprising conviction.

Alex’s eyes skipped from Lena’s, which looked confused, to Maggie’s which looked withdrawn.

“I will,” she said.

They began their slow walk toward the lab. From there, Kara would leave for her ensign shift, and Maggie would sit and keep Alex and Lena company while they worked.

They were halfway down the corridor when footsteps hurried up behind them, light but quick on the metal floors.

“Wait,” called a voice.

Alex’s arm lay along Kara’s behind Maggie’s back, and she immediately felt that arm stiffen.

They paused. Alex twisted, looking back over her shoulder. It was a woman, older than she was but not old enough to be her mother, her hair streaked with grey but her face not deeply lined. Alex recognized her: she worked in haven maintenance, though they’d rarely spoken, and never about anything other than work. Carefully, she, Maggie, and Kara managed to pivot in the hallway, and Alex caught a glimpse of Kara’s features: they looked hard. Haggard.

Maggie just looked tired.

“It’s mine,” the woman said, as she approached. “The ring. It’s mine. I just didn’t want to say anything back there, in front of everyone.”

“Oh,” Alex said. Her eyes flicked down at the woman’s left hand. It a plain wedding band lived there, but the skin near it was pale and soft-looking: until recently, that band had been half of a set. 

Alex fished the ring, wrapped in its bandanna, out of her pocket, and held it out. “Well, uh, here—”

But the woman shook her head and pushed Alex’s hand away, but not straight back — she pushed it toward Maggie, who was watching them quietly from where she leaned against the wall.

Maggie looked scared, her face pinched as though it had been wound with a key. 

“It’s for you,” the woman said.

Maggie swallowed. “For me?”

The woman nodded, her fingers pressed to Alex’s wrist, holding it, like a weathervane, toward Maggie.  “Please.”

Maggie blinked at it. Carefully, she began to disentangle herself from Alex and Kara, steadying herself against Alex’s shoulder before standing evenly on her own. She took the cloth from Alex’s hand and unfolded it carefully; the ring glinted in her palm.

(Beyond her, Kara looked dazed. Shellshocked. Alex couldn’t interpret it but she stepped closer to her, grabbing her by the elbow as though she might fall. Lena stepped closer too, on her other side, and slipped an arm around her waist.)

“This is beautiful,” Maggie said, even though Alex knew Maggie wouldn’t wear a ring with that kind of a rock. “But why?”

“You survived the plague,” the woman said, like it was obvious.

Kara flinched.

Maggie just looked more confused.

The woman looked down, embarrassed.  “My husband was a runner,” she said, and then shook her head and corrected herself: “ _ is  _ a runner. But he went on a run six months ago and his crew came back without him. None of them knew what happened.”  

She brought her hands together, wringing them. Alex could see her pressing her thumbnail into that soft skin of her ring finger, where the engagement band used to be, as she took a deep breath and forced herself to look up.

“That ring is my part of him,” she said. “And you…” She trailed off, but the fingers of her hand flicked toward Maggie, their meaning clear:  _ You’re here. You’re alive.  _

Under Alex’s hand, Kara was shaking.

“She can’t keep it,” Kara said suddenly, too loud for how close they were all standing.

“Why not?” the woman threw at her. Then, more gently, she turned back to Maggie, who was still staring at the ring like it was an alien thing. “I know it’s superstitious, but — please.”

She folded Maggie’s fingers over the ring and held it there. “Please.”

“Maggie,” Kara pressed. “Maggie, no.” Her voice wobbled like she might be about to cry, and Alex could not, for the life of her, understand why this mattered so much to her.

“It’s okay, Kara,” Maggie said. Finally, with visible effort, she tore her eyes away from her own fist to look the woman in the eyes. 

From this angle, Alex couldn’t see what Maggie saw, but it must have been enough.

“Okay,” Maggie said. She nodded. “Okay.”

“No,” Kara said, almost too softly to hear. She jerked away from Alex and, without warning, began to walk quickly away, toward the next ladder. Lena met Alex’s eyes and shrugged, confused, before chasing after Kara. Alex longed to chase after her, too, but Maggie needed her help to get up to the lab.

The woman’s shoulder’s softened, her body sagging a little in relief. “Thank you,” she said.  She released Maggie’s fist and stepped back, watching as Maggie carefully folded the ring up again and slipped it into her pocket.

She turned and walked away, and Alex watched Maggie as Maggie watched her go.

When her footsteps had faded, Alex finally spoke. “Are you okay?”

Maggie didn’t respond directly. She didn’t nod, she didn’t shake her head, she didn’t shrug. She just said, “I don’t think I want to talk about it.”

But that evening, when they returned to their room before bed, they found a bag hanging on the doorknob with a hand-knit woolen hat in it. And the following morning, a well-worn athletic wristwatch. 

Kara saw them when they took the wristwatch into the room. She averted her eyes, and when they came out again to begin their walk to the mess hall, she said nothing about it. Maggie was quiet. Embarrassed.

“Do you pray for Ahmed, Maggie?” Kara asked, as they walked.

Maggie nodded. “Every day.”

“Good,” Kara said. And then, with ferocity: “You’d better never, ever stop.”

That evening, before dinner, Alex asked Kara why she was so upset about the ring.

“It’s nothing,” Kara said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Alex felt like she had been punched. Nobody wanted to explain things to her, it seemed -- not when they mattered. Kara had never kept secrets from her.

“Don’t you see?” Maggie said, quietly, when they were alone. “Don’t you get why they’re giving me these things? It’s because they think I am what she actually is. And they think I’m closer to God because of it.”

Alex exhaled, her breath shaking, her hands shaking. 

She hadn’t put that together.

“That’s why she wants me to pray for Ahmed. For his family, like he asked us to. Because if i’m a god, then I owe him that.”

“Maggie—”   


“Everyone needs something to give them hope, Alex,” Maggie said. “It might as well be me.”

Alex thought of her tally. Of morning after morning greeted with hope for Maggie, marked with this ritual: a line cut into metal with utility knife, the metal conceding that she was stronger than it was, just as Maggie was strong, just as Kara was strong.

Perhaps, in a way, she had prayed for them.

Maggie tucked the ring and the watch into the knit hat and set them all on the shelf in their room.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning at the bottom. Also, mildly NSFW.

It took a week for the crutches to be ready. In the intervening days, Maggie and Alex made their slow, painstaking way down to the mess hall every morning, and then Maggie came with Alex and Lena to sit in the lab while they worked on replicating more of their prototype to send out to other sites for testing.

Before Maggie came out of quarantine, Kara managed to avoid being reassigned to the workforce. But after Maggie had been out a few days, Kara couldn’t defer it any longer. The major asked to meet with her for an assignment.

The morning of that meeting, Alex spoke quietly to Lena in the lab. “How are, uh, things?” She touched Lena’s upper arms where she’d had bruises from Kara’s night terrors.

Lena swallowed and shrugged. “She woke up again last night. But since she’s been on the floor, I haven’t been getting caught in it.”

“Hey guys?” Maggie said. She was sitting, as she often did, on a chair by the wall in the lab. “You don’t have to whisper. I know what’s going on. She told me.” 

“We’re working it out,” Lena said.

“I know,” Maggie said. Her eyes were kind. “I’m… I’m grateful that you’re sticking it out with her.”

Lena’s jaw dropped, and she furrowed her eyebrows, her expression turning indignant. “I wouldn’t just give up on her!”

“I know!” Maggie said. She held a hand out, fingers spread, palm down, as though to push the tension down. “You mean a lot to her. She talked about you constantly, you know. Out there. I couldn’t have gotten her to stop if I tried.”

Lena’s shoulders relaxed and she looked down, hiding a small, tight smile. Alex gently touched her back. Kara was lucky, Alex thought, to be loved so fully. 

“They won’t make her start Running again, do you think?” Lena asked, her voice trembling a little as they turned back to their work at the lab bench. “We’ve only just got her back.”

Alex had worried about that, too. Her hands shook as she picked up her pipette and sample. She watched them tremble and then set set equipment down, flexing her fingers in their latex gloves, willing them to settle. “They wouldn’t be that cruel. Surely.”

“I’d kill them,” Maggie said.

Alex looked over. 

Maggie’s face was serious, her eyes deadly. “I mean it.”

But when Kara came to the lab an hour later, Alex had still barely managed to contain the tremor in her hands.

When Kara spoke, her body was stiff, her hands clasped each other behind her back. Her voice did not shake, but felt tense, like a rigid old building pushing back against a gale.

“I’m—” she coughed, then cleared her throat and started again, her tone flat, as though she were reporting duties to a superior officer. “I’m going to be an ensign on the haven for now. I might help in the kitchen sometimes, too.” She stared at the floor when she told them, not at her feet but in the middle distance, as though trying to see through it. She looked, Alex thought, like she was seeking out a hidden world behind the scratched and dented steel. 

Without another word, Kara pivoted and left the room. Her hands clutched each other so tightly at the small of her back that the knuckles whitened.

Maggie, Lena, and Alex could all tell that she was on the verge of shattering.

Lena looked at her half-run tests, her gloved hands, until Alex shoved her gently on the shoulder. “Go,” she said. “She needs you. I’ve got this.”

Lena’s face softened in silent thanks, and she shucked off her gloves and lab coat and chased after Kara. 

Maggie watched her go, and her eyes lingered on the door after it closed. “I meant it,” she said, eventually. 

Alex nodded. “I know, love.”

Maggie looked over at her, but her eyes weren’t angry, or hard. They were calm, as close to neutral as Alex had ever seen them. “She’s had PTSD since Gibraltar at least. Maybe before, maybe since Senegal, or even Argo. I won’t let them send her back out into that mess.”

Alex set her jaw. “I won’t either.”

 

\--

 

Alex and Maggie’s days moved into one another, made of slow, agonizing hobbles from their room to the mess hall to the lab, with a few trips down to Engineering to meet with Jack. 

Gifts and tokens continued to appear near their room. 

A single earring. A worn T-shirt. A pair of barely-worn baby shoes. A single dog tag removed from its chain. 

That last one wasn’t a mystery: it bore the name of the wife of a runner Maggie and Kara had worked with several times. She had been missing since before her husband had come to the haven, Maggie said. 

Alex remembered the story Kara had told about the man who had asked her to pray for him in Morocco. About how she still, to this day, would pray nightly to a deity she didn’t believe in for the safety of his family. 

(There were a few moments when Alex would come back from the shower, or the toilet, to find Maggie sitting on the edge of the bed with her eyes closed, her hands resting on her thighs. And Alex wondered, then, whether Maggie was praying for him in her own way.)

Maggie would examine each new gift when it appeared, and then add it to the shelf. Alex would rearrange things to make room for each new one. The tokens began to take up so much space that Alex had to consolidate their own possessions onto the shelf below it, their clothes wedged so tightly they seemed about to be squeezed out onto the floor like toothpaste. 

Alex never complained about helping Maggie to get around the haven, but over several days, her shoulders grew tired, her back tight and aching from the strain. A week after their first meeting with Jack, he met them in Engineering with a pair of crutches tailored to Maggie’s body. They cuffed to her forearms, just below the elbow, “because underarm nerve damage isn’t good for anyone, and because this way you can just let them hang from your arms and use both hands to get yourself up and down the ladders,” he explained.

Maggie grinned more broadly than Alex had seen since they’d pulled her from the boat. It made Alex’s heart want to break from happiness. She wondered if it was just the fact of having the crutches and the independence that came with them that made Maggie so happy, or if it was the fact that Jack had assumed, without bothering to ask, that Maggie would, given time, build the core and upper-body strength to navigate the ladders on her own.

Maggie bit her lip in concentration as she practiced using the crutches, walking from one end of the room to the other and back again, while Jack watched with a thoughtful eye, checking for any necessary adjustments or points of weakness. “Everything feel good?” he asked.

“Amazing,” Maggie said, shuffling a little in place between her foot and the crutches, as though she were testing out new shoes. “This is just…” She looked up at him and grinned again. “Thank you.”

“You really have no idea what you’ve done for us,” Alex said.

Jack smiled bashfully and shrugged. “It was fun. Wish I could have done it with carbon fiber or something, instead of whatever scrap aluminium and steel we had lying around. Maybe one day.”

Maggie’s smile flickered, but only for a moment. “Maybe,” she said.

On their way back to the room, Maggie did need a little extra help getting up the ladders, but not as much as Alex expected. She let the crutches hang from her elbows as she gripped the ladder with both hands and pulled her leg up, one rung at a time. Near the top of the second ladder, her elbows shook and she didn’t resist when Alex boosted her a little. Part of her strength was surely the adrenaline that came with this new independence, but part of it had to be that Maggie was quickly getting stronger, day by day.

That night, in their bed, Maggie let Alex rub the tight, tired muscles of her shoulders and back until they were soft and loose. Then Alex shucked off her own shirt and lay down behind her, pressing her chest to Maggie’s back: the most skin-to-skin contact they’d had since Maggie’s return. Maggie’s body was lax from the massage, but it softened even further against Alex’s chest, and Alex softened herself into the ridges of Maggie’s ribs and spine. She imagined herself soothing Maggie’s sharp edges, filling in the gaps they created, as she tucked herself forward. Maggie’s hair was soft, as it had always been, even though it smelled of the same chemical soap that made Alex’s hair feel coarse and brittle. Taking up her courage, Alex nudged her way through to the skin of Maggie’s neck and kissed it gently once, and then again. Maggie hummed and tipped her head a little, offering Alex more skin. Alex grew bolder, pressing herself tighter against Maggie and trailing her fingers up toward a breast.

As Alex’s hand came closer, Maggie shifted back and tilted her chin up just far enough to offer Alex her mouth. Alex took it, slowly at first, and then deeper, swallowing the soft sounds that Maggie made when Alex touched her nipple. Alex’s heart thrilled, her diaphragm twitching in elated breaths, and she dared to trail her hand down, to find the waistband of Maggie’s pants—

Maggie’s hand stopped hers.

They parted. Maggie blinked up at Alex with wide eyes and swollen lips. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

Alex smiled at her and hoped her sadness didn’t show. “Don’t be.”

“I just, I’m not… I don’t feel…” Maggie’s mouth worked, searching for the words, but as her eyes began to redden, Alex knew she wouldn’t find them.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Alex said. She raised that hand back up, away from Maggie’s waist, and laid it on her cheek. “It’s okay,” she repeated.

Truly, it was better, Alex thought. She’d have to tell Maggie about Lena before they were any more intimate than they’d been. Maggie deserved to know.

(This did nothing to loosen the tight fist of fear that clenched behind her ribs every time she thought about that conversation.)

They shared one more kiss — a chaste one, closure for the heat they’d just shared, and then Maggie settled onto her back, and Alex pulled the blanket over them and settled against Maggie’s side to sleep. 

Alex’s breathing calmed, her body settling into rest, when Maggie spoke again, her chest moving against Alex’s.

“What’s the tally?”

Alex blinked, a little groggy already. “The tally?”

Maggie shifted a little, her toes stretching down toward the wall at the foot of the bed. “The one down there. Unless you’ve been keeping other tallies somewhere?”

Alex hummed and pulled Maggie tighter against herself. “I counted the days.”

“The days we were gone?”

The wind picked up outside, and Alex could hear the waves crashing, and feel the floor tilting ever so slightly from one side to the other below them as the haven rocked. She pressed herself tighter still into Maggie’s side, felt Maggie’s hip-bone pressing into the hollow of her pelvis, felt their breasts allow for each other. Maggie’s chest moved with each breath, expanding into Alex, moving Alex’s lungs. 

Alex teased her toes along the underside of Maggie’s foot.

“The mornings I woke up without you.”

 

\--

 

Alex and Lena managed to replicate enough of their prototype drug to start distributing it with the runners. It would be months before they would learn anything about the outcome, and infrastructure limitations meant the rate of return would probably be low, so they kept running their own tests. Kara kept donating blood to their research.

As Maggie became more independent, Alex saw her less. Maggie spent hours every day exercising, doing push-ups and walking laps with her crutches. She was allotted extra rations from the mess hall and chose high-protein, high-calorie options whenever she could. She began to fill out, looking more and more like the strong, muscular version of herself she had been before. 

Despite all of it--Maggie’s growing strength, her independence--something between them continued to feel fractured. 

Some nights, in bed, Maggie would offer Alex her back and she would let Alex fold herself around her, tight enough that their chests expanded into each other with each breath.

Some nights, she would offer Alex her back but she would stiffen if Alex came too close, as though Alex’s touch turned her to ice. And so Alex would pull back, tuck her hands tight to her own chest, and remember the cold of sleeping alone.

Some nights Maggie would mold herself into Alex’s body, her arm wound tight around Alex’s ribs, and Alex would be kept awake half the night by the tickle of Maggie’s breath against her neck. She wouldn’t mind it, not for a fraction of a second.

There was more space in the foot of their bed than there had been, back before everything. That was more of an adjustment than Alex would have expected, but she didn’t mind.

On the nights when Maggie allowed it, Alex liked to hold Maggie’s foot between her own, stacking them sole-to-instep under the covers, as though she could keep it safe.

 

—

 

During the day, Lena worked on replicating more of the prototype while Alex worked on improving it. With a fresh pint of Kara’s blood--the second one she’d donated since she’d come back--and the knowledge that something in their existing prototype seemed to work, Alex spent her days hunched over petri dishes and microscopes and the gel electrophoresis machine trying to pinpoint what it was, and see if their treatment could help them reverse-engineer a vaccine.

Kara looked tired. The ensign work, mostly running messages an errands around the haven, was dull, even if it kept her busy. Washing dishes was worse because she spent those shifts inside, in the windowless kitchen, with nobody to talk to.

She never complained, of course. Kara wasn’t a complainer: she did her job. When asked, she said that she was fine, that she was glad to have something to do.

She joined Lena, Alex, and Maggie for every meal that didn’t conflict with her shifts. In the evening, she followed Lena back to their room.  

“How are things?” Alex asked Lena, two weeks into their new routine.

Lena moved her hand over her head as though to push hair out of her eyes, but every strand of her hair was, as always, carefully tucked into her hair tie. “Unsustainable,” she said, and then gestured into the air around her, vaguely encompassing everything, the haven, perhaps the whole world. “But isn’t everything, right now?”

And so the days ticked by in a kind of metronomic détente, time pushing forward but nothing changing.

Until one morning when, walking back to her room from the shower, Alex overheard Kara and Lena arguing.

She wouldn’t interfere, normally. All couples argued from time to time, and in the close quarters of the haven, privacy was an illusion carefully maintained by collective consent. But the words that came to her through the thin cabin door wrapped ice around her heart.

“You can’t keep doing this,” Lena said.

Kara’s voice was quieter but more desperate. “I want to stop. I wish I could stop, but I—”

“Look at this bruising, Kara!” Lena said, her voice louder, and Alex, without warning, reached for the door handle. If Lena was hurt, if Kara was hurting her, then Alex wouldn’t let either of them continue trying to handle it on their own.

But the bruising wasn’t on Lena’s wrists.

Kara and Lena sat on the edge of the unmade bed. Near their feet were the second pillow and an extra blanket where Kara must have slept.

Kara’s hands lay, palm up, in Lena’s hands, and Lena held them tenderly, as though she were cradling small animals. It was Kara’s wrists, not Lena’s, that were bruised.

“Jesus,” Alex said. “What’s going on here?”

Kara jerked free of Lena’s grip and crossed her arms over her chest, tucking her hands into her underarms. She looked away, back toward where the bed met the wall, and said nothing.

“It’s all right, Alex.” Lena knitted her fingers together, twisting. “You should have knocked.”

“When I hear two people I love arguing about bruising, I’m not going to knock, Lena. I hope you wouldn’t knock if our positions were reversed.”

Lena’s face twitched, her frustration warring with something else, something softer and more timid.

Alex stepped forward slowly, as though approaching a wild animal, and laid a finger on Kara’s shoulder. “Let me see?” she asked. 

Without a sound, but also without resistance, Kara raised her hand.

The skin was abraded. The bruising looked like it came from friction, not impact or pressure.

“A few nights ago I had a nightmare,” Kara said, without waiting to be asked. “My arms flailed out, and I hit Lena in the forehead. It had been going so well, Alex, nothing had happened in over a week. So I started—I tie my wrists.” She pulled her hands back toward herself, wrapping them around each other against her chest. Her eyes settled on Lena with such devotion even as her words were directed to Alex. “I do it every night,” Kara said. “So I can’t hurt her.”

Lena shook her head, and Kara lifted a hand toward Lena’s face, tucking back a strand of fallen hair. Lena leaned gently into the touch. “But you’re hurting yourself.” she said. 

“I’d rather have these bruises forever than hurt you even once,” Kara whispered, her voice shaking. She lifted her eyes to Alex. “It usually helps, but sometimes the nightmares make me panic and then I wake up and I’m tied up and I fight myself. So this happens.” 

“You need to stop calling them nightmares.”

Alex’s gaze shot up. Maggie stood in the doorway. Alex had been so intent on listening to Kara, her worry like a sponge that seeped up every bit of nuance to Kara’s tone and body and face, that she hadn’t heard Maggie’s crutches coming down the walkway. Maggie had a towel hooked over her shoulder, her toiletry bag in her hand. She’d been heading to the lavatory.

Maggie nudged the door just a bit wider, wide enough to squeeze herself into the room with the rest of them. The tiny space was crowded, but Maggie worked her way toward the small gap between Alex and Kara. Alex slipped back to make space for her, reaching up out of instinct to steady Maggie as she carefully set herself down into the mattress--but Maggie shrugged her hand away.

“We’ve talked about this,” Maggie said. “They’re flashbacks.”

Kara looked down, chastened. “I don’t see why it matters so much what I call them.”

“Everyone has nightmares, Kara.” Maggie handed her crutches to Alex and leaned forward, her hand closing over Kara’s. “Not everyone has flashbacks.” 

Alex could see the tension in Kara’s knuckles as she clutched Maggie’s hand in return. It made their hands tremble where they gripped each other. 

“Own what this is,” Maggie said quietly. “That’s the first step.”

But that twigged something in Kara. She tugged her hand away and stood up, walking as far away as the tiny room would allow — which was only about a step and a half. “The first step of what, Maggie?” she asked, pressing her clenched fist to the metal wall. “What’s the second step when there’s no medication, no psychiatrists, not even a fucking support group? What’s my process supposed to be?”

Alex’s heart leapt into her throat. She could count on one hand the number of times she had heard Kara curse, ever, for as long as they’d been family.

“We’ll figure it out,” Maggie said. Her voice was calm, but the tension in Kara’s shoulders rose, as though the calmness was making her more aggravated. “One day at a time, Kara, just like before.” 

“And look at where that got me. I’m ruining the home I worked so hard to come back to.”

“Kara—”

But Kara threw up a hand, cutting Maggie off. Her bruised wrist glared at Alex like a demon in the dim lighting. “I’m done talking about this,” Kara said. Without another word, she grabbed a towel and her toiletry kit and left the room, her footsteps fading down the walkway toward the showers.

Lena, Maggie, and Alex listened to the sound of Kara’s retreating footsteps until they vanished, and then they sat with the silence, Lena looked down at her own hands, clutched in her lap. Alex looked at the spot on the wall where Kara had pressed her fist. In her peripheral vision, she could see Maggie staring at her with a frightening intensity. 

Kara had always tended to be mopey, or withdrawn, or, occasionally, passive-aggressive when she was upset. She wasn’t explosive or defensive. Alex couldn’t remember ever hearing Kara snap that way. 

Maggie broke the silence first, turning to Lena. “Are you okay?”

“Physically, yes, I’m fine,” Lena said, her eyes still on the door as though she could see Kara through it on the other side. “But every fibre of me is worried about her.”

Alex nodded her agreement. Nobody was looking at her, neither Maggie nor Lena saw it. But she felt so helpless that doing anything--even if it was just to acknowledge, physically, that she, too, was worried--felt better than doing nothing at all.

“We should talk to the major about getting her her own room,” Maggie said.

But Alex shook her head. “The haven’s at capacity. There are literally no rooms.”

“And please don’t suggest it to her,” Lena added. “The other day she talked about bunking in a quarantine chamber. I told her I wouldn’t hear of it.”

Alex stood up and began pacing in the small room. “There has to be medication for this somewhere, right? I mean, it’s not like life on land has totally stopped—there must still be pharmaceutical factories? Or pharmacies, or—”   


Maggie barked out an incredulous laugh. 

For weeks now, since Maggie had come out of quarantine, Alex had used patience and silence to manage Maggie’s dependency and her unpredictable emotions. What welled up in Alex now was hot and sharp: Kara was traumatized, Alex was worried, and Maggie had dared to laugh at her desperate grasping for solutions.

It was enough to make Alex finally snap.

She halted mid-step and wheeled to look down at Maggie, who was shaking her head with a kind of bemused frustration.

“What’s so funny, Maggie?” Alex spat. 

The bemusement drained from Maggie’s gaze like the last bits of sand through an hourglass. Her eyes rose to Alex’s, and her voice hardened. “Pharmacies.”   
  
“Pharmacies?” Alex echoed, bracing her hands on her hips.

“Yeah, pharmacies. Pharmaceutical factories. Hilarious.”

Alex felt an explosion building up in her chest, one that might erupt in her in rage or tears but more likely a combination of both. She was so tired of this: of worrying about Kara, of this rollercoaster of disconnection from Maggie even as they spent most of their time together, of spending her entire life in a small corner of a couple acres of floating rust-bucket.

She opened her mouth to respond, but Maggie cut her off before she could speak.

“You guys have no idea. Neither of you.” She reached for her crutches with one hand and and the edge of the bed with the other and began to push herself up to standing. Alex’s exasperation didn’t override her instinct; she reached for Maggie’s elbow to steady her as she rose.

“No,” Maggie snapped, and tugged her arm away. Alex, sad and frustrated, watched Maggie pull herself up and adjust her crutches, grab her towel and toiletry bag from where she’d set them down, and then make her way out of the room.

Alex stared, for a moment, at the open door, and then looked over at Lena, who was still sitting on the edge of the bed looking stricken.

Lena met Alex’s eyes and then jerked her chin toward the door.  _ Go after her _ . 

Alex did. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: discussions of intimate partner violence and PTSD.


End file.
